Simulation Theory Quotes

How Not to Break Into Sublevel Two (A list by Cameron Morgan, with help from Macey McHenry) .... -Teleportation: Sure, Liz says she has an excellent working theory, but she doesn't have a prototype yet. And without a prototype it's pretty much a moot point. -That thing Bex's parents did in Dubai with liquid nitrogen, an earthquake simulator, and a ferret: Because we don't have a ferret.

Power floats like money, like language, like theory.

You are deluded if you think that the world around you is a physical construct separate from your own mind.

Just a dozen of high quality qudits will be sufficient to simulate the state of 100 billion neurons of human brain for quantum machine learning.

Six qudit virtual photon simulator is our first approach to develop the behavior of 100 billion neurons and to build the core quantum machine learning platform.

If being a nihilist, is carrying, to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems, this radical trait of derision and of violence, this challenge that the system is summoned to answer through its own death, then I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us.

This isn’t real. It would be too much.

What do Chile, Biafra, the boat people, Bologna, or Poland matter? All of that comes to be annihilated on the television screen. We are in the era of events without consequences (and of theories without consequences).

You," she says,pointing at me. "I expected. All the trouble with your aptitude test results made me suspicious from the beginning.But you..." She shakes her had as she sifts her eyes to Tobias. "You, Tobias-or should I call you Four?-managed to elude me," she says quietly. "Everything about you checked out: test results, initiation simulations, everything. But here you are nonetheless." She folds her hands and sets her chin on top of them. "Perhaps you could explain to me how that is?" "You're the genius," he says coolly. "Why don't you tell me?" Her mouth curls into a smile. "My theory is that you really do belong in Abnegation. That your Divergence is weaker." She smiles wider. Like she's amused. I grit my teeth and consider lunging across the table and strangling her. If I didn't have a bullet in my shoulder, I might. "Your powers of deductive reasoning are stunning," spits Tobias. "Consider me awed." I look sideways at him. I had always forgotten about this side of him-the part that is more likely to explode than to lie down and die." "Now that your intelligence has been verified, you might want to get on with killing us." Tobias closes his eyes. "You have a lot of Abnegation leaders to murder, after all.

It's one of the Filter theories. Absorption into simulations. Cultures swirling out of the universe like dirty water down a plug. Derealization vortices.

Our reality is similar to the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis; we live in a simulated world, but it is not in a computer—it is in our head.

The law of computers is the same as the law of the marketplace. The earth's atmosphere was divided up into a network of cubes, each reducible to a collection of points, and each point the product of a set of calculations. As far as science was concerned, this was the end of clouds, which were but a series of coordinates simulated in a space of greater than three dimensions.

The combination of Bayes and Markov Chain Monte Carlo has been called "arguably the most powerful mechanism ever created for processing data and knowledge." Almost instantaneously MCMC and Gibbs sampling changed statisticians' entire method of attacking problems. In the words of Thomas Kuhn, it was a paradigm shift. MCMC solved real problems, used computer algorithms instead of theorems, and led statisticians and scientists into a worked where "exact" meant "simulated" and repetitive computer operations replaced mathematical equations. It was a quantum leap in statistics.

Chaos theory is the idea that a tiny change now can result in a large change later. It was first observed by a meteorologist modeling a weather sequence. He mistakenly rounded his variables to three decimal places instead of six, and was shocked to discover this tiny change transformed his entire pattern of simulated weather over a two-month period, thereby proving even the most insignificant change in the atmosphere may have a dramatic effect on the weather.

Uploading your brain entails recording all the details of your brain, and then using them to simulate your brain on a computer. The simulator would be identical to your brain, so “you” would then live in the computer. The goal is to separate your mental and intellectual “you” from your biological body. This way, you can live indefinitely, including in a computer that is remote from Earth. You wouldn’t die if Earth became uninhabitable.

In this section I have tried to demonstrate that Darwinian thinking does live up to its billing as universal acid: it turns the whole traditional world upside down, challenging the top-down image of designs flowing from that genius of geniuses, the Intelligent Designer, and replacing it with the bubble-up image of mindless, motiveless cyclical processes churning out ever-more robust combinations until they start replicating on their own, speeding up the design process by reusing all the best bits over and over. Some of these earliest offspring eventually join forces (one major crane, symbiosis), which leads to multicellularity (another major crane), which leads to the more effective exploration vehicles made possible by sexual reproduction (another major crane), which eventually leads in one species to language and cultural evolution (cranes again), which provide the medium for literature and science and engineering, the latest cranes to emerge, which in turn permits us to “go meta” in a way no other life form can do, reflecting in many ways on who and what we are and how we got here, modeling these processes in plays and novels, theories and computer simulations, and ever-more thinking tools to add to our impressive toolbox. This perspective is so widely unifying and at the same time so generous with detailed insights that one might say it’s a power tool, all on its own. Those who are still strangely repelled by Darwinian thinking must consider the likelihood that if they try to go it alone with only the hand tools of tradition, they will find themselves laboring far from the cutting edge of research on important phenomena as diverse as epidemics and epistemology, biofuels and brain architecture, molecular genetics, music, and morality.

Computer simulation often works fine if we assume nothing more than Newton’s laws at the atomic scale, even though we know that really we should be using quantum, not classical, mechanics at that level. But sometimes approximating the behaviour of atoms as though they were classical billiard-ball particles isn’t sufficient. We really do need to take quantum behaviour into account to accurately model chemical reactions involved in industrial catalysis or drug action, say. We can do that by solving the Schrödinger equation for the particles, but only approximately: we need to make lots of simplifications if the maths is to be tractable. But what if we had a computer that itself works by the laws of quantum mechanics? Then the sort of behaviour you’re trying to simulate is built into the very way the machine operates: it is hardwired into the fabric. This was the point Feynman made in his article. But no such machines existed. At any rate they would, as he pointed out with wry understatement, be ‘machines of a different kind’ from any computer built so far. Feynman didn’t work out the full theory of what such a machine would look like or how it would work – but he insisted that ‘if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum-mechanical’.

Perhaps Einstein himself said it best when he said, “I have no special talents.… I am only passionately curious.” In fact, Einstein would confess that he had to struggle with mathematics in his youth. To one group of schoolchildren, he once confided, “No matter what difficulties you may have with mathematics, mine were greater.” So why was Einstein Einstein? First, Einstein spent most of his time thinking via “thought experiments.” He was a theoretical physicist, not an experimental one, so he was continually running sophisticated simulations of the future in his head. In other words, his laboratory was his mind. Second, he was known to spend up to ten years or more on a single thought experiment. From the age of sixteen to twenty-six, he focused on the problem of light and whether it was possible to outrace a light beam. This led to the birth of special relativity, which eventually revealed the secret of the stars and gave us the atomic bomb. From the age of twenty-six to thirty-six, he focused on a theory of gravity, which eventually gave us black holes and the big-bang theory of the universe. And then from the age of thirty-six to the end of his life, he tried to find a theory of everything to unify all of physics. Clearly, the ability to spend ten or more years on a single problem showed the tenacity with which he would simulate experiments in his head.

Positive arguments for the natural possibility of absent qualia have not been as prevalent as arguments for inverted qualia, but they have been made. The most detailed presentation of these arguments is given by Block (1978). These arguments almost always have the same form. They consist in the exhibition of a realization of our functional organization in some unusual medium, combined with an appeal to intuition. It is pointed out, for example, that the organization of our brain might be simulated by the people of China or even mirrored in the economy of Bolivia. If we got every person in China to simulate a neuron (we would need to multiply the population by ten or one hundred, but no matter), and equipped them with radio links to simulate synaptic connections, then the functional organization would be there. But surely, says the argument, this baroque system would not be conscious! There is a certain intuitive force to this argument. Many people have a strong feeling that a system like this is simply the wrong sort of thing to have a conscious experience. Such a “group mind” would seem to be the stuff of a science-fiction tale, rather than the kind of thing that could really exist. But there is only an intuitive force. This certainly falls far short of a knockdown argument. Many have pointed out that while it may be intuitively implausible that such a system should give rise to experience, it is equally intuitively implausible that a brain should give rise to experience! Whoever would have thought that this hunk of gray matter would be the sort of thing that could produce vivid subjective experiences? And yet it does. Of course this does not show that a nation's population could produce a mind, but it is a strong counter to the intuitive argument that it would not. . . . Once we realize how tightly a specification of functional organization constrains the structure of a system, it becomes less implausible that even the population of China could support conscious experience if organized appropriately. If we take our image of the population, speed it up by a factor of a million or so, and shrink it into an area the size of a head, we are left with something that looks a lot like a brain, except that it has homunculi—tiny people—where a brain would have neurons. On the face of it, there is not much reason to suppose that neurons should do any better a job than homunculi in supporting experience.

Another common form of mental illness is bipolar disorder, in which a person suffers from extreme bouts of wild, delusional optimism, followed by a crash and then periods of deep depression. Bipolar disorder also seems to run in families and, curiously, strikes frequently in artists; perhaps their great works of art were created during bursts of creativity and optimism. A list of creative people who were afflicted by bipolar disorder reads like a Who’s Who of Hollywood celebrities, musicians, artists, and writers. Although the drug lithium seems to control many of the symptoms of bipolar disorder, the causes are not entirely clear. One theory states that bipolar disorder may be caused by an imbalance between the left and right hemispheres. Dr. Michael Sweeney notes, “Brain scans have led researchers to generally assign negative emotions such as sadness to the right hemisphere and positive emotions such as joy to the left hemisphere. For at least a century, neuroscientists have noticed a link between damage to the brain’s left hemisphere and negative moods, including depression and uncontrollable crying. Damage to the right, however, has been associated with a broad array of positive emotions.” So the left hemisphere, which is analytical and controls language, tends to become manic if left to itself. The right hemisphere, on the contrary, is holistic and tends to check this mania. Dr. V. S. Ramachandran writes, “If left unchecked, the left hemisphere would likely render a person delusional or manic.… So it seems reasonable to postulate a ‘devil’s advocate’ in the right hemisphere that allows ‘you’ to adopt a detached, objective (allocentric) view of yourself.” If human consciousness involves simulating the future, it has to compute the outcomes of future events with certain probabilities. It needs, therefore, a delicate balance between optimism and pessimism to estimate the chances of success or failures for certain courses of action. But in some sense, depression is the price we pay for being able to simulate the future. Our consciousness has the ability to conjure up all sorts of horrific outcomes for the future, and is therefore aware of all the bad things that could happen, even if they are not realistic. It is hard to verify many of these theories, since brain scans of people who are clinically depressed indicate that many brain areas are affected. It is difficult to pinpoint the source of the problem, but among the clinically depressed, activity in the parietal and temporal lobes seems to be suppressed, perhaps indicating that the person is withdrawn from the outside world and living in their own internal world. In particular, the ventromedial cortex seems to play an important role. This area apparently creates the feeling that there is a sense of meaning and wholeness to the world, so that everything seems to have a purpose. Overactivity in this area can cause mania, in which people think they are omnipotent. Underactivity in this area is associated with depression and the feeling that life is pointless. So it is possible that a defect in this area may be responsible for some mood swings.

The rate of time flow perceived by an observer in the simulated universe is completely independent of the rate at which a computer runs the simulation, a point emphasized in Greg Egan's science-fiction novel Permutation City. Moreover, as we discussed in the last chapter and as stressed by Einstein, it's arguably more natural to view our Universe not from the frog perspective as a three-dimensional space where things happen, but from the bird perspective as a four-dimensional spacetime that merely is. There should therefore be no need for the computer to compute anything at all-it could simply store all the four-dimensional data, that is, encode all properties of the mathematical structure that is our Universe. Individual time slices could then be read out sequentially if desired, and the "simulated" world should still feel as real to its inhabitants as in the case where only three-dimensional data is stored and evolved. In conclusion: the role of the simulating computer isn't to compute the history of our Universe, but to specify it. How specify it? The way in which the data are stored (the type of computer, the data format, etc.) should be irrelevant, so the extent to which the inhabitants of the simulated universe perceive themselves as real should be independent of whatever method is used for data compression. The physical laws that we've discovered provide great means of data compression, since they make it sufficient to store the initial data at some time together with the equations and a program computing the future from these initial data. As emphasized on pages 340-344, the initial data might be extremely simple: popular initial states from quantum field theory with intimidating names such as the Hawking-Hartle wavefunction or the inflationary Bunch-Davies vacuum have very low algorithmic complexity, since they can be defined in brief physics papers, yet simulating their time evolution would simulate not merely one universe like ours, but a vast decohering collection of parallel ones. It's therefore plausible that our Universe (and even the whole Level III multiverse) could be simulated by quite a short computer program.

The three-body problem illustrates how easy it is to run into computational irreducibility. It is a problem that borders on the trivial, yet it seems that it cannot be solved analytically. There is no apparent shortcut, no mathematical equation that can tell you the trajectory.5 In general, if you want to know where the planets will end up at some time down the road, you have to ride along with them as they trace their paths, either in practice or in simulation. If we want to know whether the planets crash, whether one of them will fly off into space, whether they will be periodic or chaotic, we have to follow them over the course of their travels. We can’t plug coordinates or a time period into a formula and crank out the answer.

If you look at various moral views, they differ fairly radically on what a good outcome looks like,” MacAskill explains. “Even if you just compare the kind of hedonist view that says simulated minds are just as good, versus the utilitarian view that says no, it needs to be flesh-and-blood humans. They’re very, very similar theories. They’re gonna radically disagree on how we should use our cosmic endowment”—meaning humans’ ultimate ambition for what we plan to do in the universe. “It would be war, basically,” he says: the classic “narcissism of small differences” that has always roiled academic departments, but with cosmic stakes.

So anyway, the mind-boggling bit is that the theory hints that the entire universe is just two-dimensional information on a cosmological horizon and that everything we think we see in three dimensions is really as much an illusion as a 3D movie, and it could all be a simulation.

To develop judgment, you need to not only read theory but also apply it, and discussion-based or case-based teaching is a way to simulate business situations and have students ask themselves, “What would I do if I were in this specific situation?

I suppose that this viewpoint-that physical systems are to be regarded as merely computational entities-stems partly from the powerful and increasing role that computational simulations play in modern twentieth-century science, and also partly from a belief that physical objects are themselves merely 'patterns of information', in some sense, that are subject to computational mathematical laws. Most of the material of our bodies and brains, after all, is being continuously replaced, and it is just its pattern that persists. Moreover, matter itself seems to have merely a transient existence since it can be converted from one form into another. Even the mass of a material body, which provides a precise physical measure of the quantity of matter that the body contains, can in appropriate circumstances be converted into pure energy (according to Einstein's famous E=mc^2)-so even material substance seems to be able to convert itself into something with a theoretical mathematical actuality. Furthermore, quantum theory seemst o tell us that material particles are merely 'waves' of information. (We shall examine these issues more thoroughly in Part II.) Thus, matter itself is nebulous and transient; and it is not at all unreasonable to suppose that the persistence of 'self' might have more to do with the preservation of patterns than of actual material particles.

breezed past me towards the cockpit. “I’ll drive.” “Why you?” Wait, shut up, Penny. You’ve got a goose-egg on your forehead and your heart aches. You don’t want to drive! Fortunately, Claire had her answer ready. “Artificially enhanced super reflexes, I’ve been watching Remmy, and I play more flight simulators than you do.” Relieved to be relieved of duty, I sank down in a chair and closed my eyes. The ship lurched, pulling me down for a second, but that meant we were airborne. Or spaceborne. I only felt a gentle tug to one side as we accelerated. Claire was getting the hang of the system. I peeked enough to see the wall towards the back of the ship brighten. Evidence for my theory that Remmy used the push of aetheric rotors to disguise the pull of engine thrust. “Any guesses how I find Europa station?” Claire called out.

In the age of computer simulation, when flows in everything from jet turbines to heart valves are modeled on supercomputers, it is hard to remember how easily nature can confound an experimenter. In fact, no computer today can completely simulate even so simple a system as Libchaber's liquid helium cell. Whenever a good physicist examines a simulation, he must wonder what bit of reality was left out, what potential surprise was sidestepped. Libchaber liked to say that he would not want to fly in a simulated airplane-he would wonder what had been missed. Furthermore, he would say that computer simulations help to build intuition or to refine calculations, but they do not give birth to genuine discovery. This, at any rate, is the experimenter's creed. His experiment was so immaculate, his scientific goals so abstract, that there were still physicists who considered Libchaber's work more philosophy or mathematics than physics. He believed, in turn, that the ruling standards of his field were reductionist, giving primacy to the properties of atoms. "A physicist would ask me, How does this atom come here and stick there? And what is the sensitivity to the surface? And can you write the Hamiltonian of the system? "And if I tell him, I don't care, what interests me is this shape, the mathematics of the shape and the evolution, the bifurcation from this shape to that shape to this shape, he will tell me, that's not physics, you are doing mathematics. Even today he will tell me that. Then what can I say? Yes, of course, I am doing mathematics. But it is relevant to what is around us. That is nature, too." The patterns he found were indeed abstract. They were mathematical. They said nothing about the properties of liquid helium or copper or about the behavior of atoms near absolute zero. But they were the patterns that Libchaber's mystical forbears had dreamed of. They made legitimate a realm of experimentation in which many scientists, from chemists to electrical engineers, soon became explorers, seeking out the new elements of motion. The patterns were there to see the first time eh succeeded in raising the temperature enough to isolate the first period-doubling, and the next, and the next. According to the new theory, the bifurcations should have produced a geometry with precise scaling, and that was just what Libchaber saw, the universal Feigenbaum constants turning in that instant from a mathematical ideal to a physical reality, measurable and reproducible. He remembered the feeling long afterward, the eerie witnessing of one bifurcation after another and then the realization that he was seeing an infinite cascade, rich with structure. It was, as he said, amusing.

The process of de-materialization of value is part of the general process of abstraction that is the general trend of capitalism. Marx’s theory of value is based on the concept of abstract labour: labour time is the source and the measure of value. This implies that, from the point of view of valorization, the concrete usefulness of the working activity is irrelevant. What counts is the abstract work–time, not the concrete contents of productive activity. In the sphere of the market, things are not considered according to their usefulness, but only in terms of their exchangeability. Similarly, in the sphere of language, words are exchanged and valued according to their performativity, that is, their pragmatic efficiency. It is not truth, but effectiveness, against which we measure value in the sphere of communication. Pragmatics, as opposed to hermeneutics, is the methodology of social communication, particularly in the age of pervasive media: when information flows are pervading every space of the public discourse and imagination, simulation takes the central place in the emanation of the shared hallucination we call the ‘world’. Signs are exchanged with signs, not with real things.

Cockshott and Cottrell argue that improvements in computer power, together with the application of advanced maths and information theory removes, in principle, the Hayek/Robbins objection: that the planner can never have better realtime information than a market. What’s more, unlike the left in the calculation debate, they say the computer model we would need for planned production should use the labour theory of value, and not try to simulate the results of supply and demand.

The potential of simulations to be used for manipulative and controlling purposes highlights the ethical complexities associated with these technologies. It underscores the importance of establishing ethical guidelines to govern the creation and use of simulations

In the context of simulation theory, the first simulator could be viewed as an uncaused cause, an entity that exists outside the conventional understanding of time and causality.

Everything has value only when ranked against something else; everyone has value only when ranked against someone else. Every situation is win-lose, unless it is win-win—a situation where players are free to collaborate only because they seek prizes in different games. The real world appears as a video arcadia divided into many and varied games.

In his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf, Hitler put forth the theory that “in the big lie there is a force of credibility.” He imagined “untruths so colossal” that the public “would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” In these passages, he was accusing Jews and Marxists of using the rhetorical Big Lie to start World War I. (Accusing others of using the Big Lie is a good way to deploy the Big Lie.) But really, he was writing a guidebook that he would later follow.

Many adherents of the simulation hypothesis think that quantum indeterminacy is simply an optimization technique with the same basic idea: only render that which is being observed so that not every particle in the whole universe has to be rendered at one time, only those which are being observed. Everything else is in a state of superposition, or stored simply as information. If there’s one thought I want to leave you with about computer science and information theory, it’s that optimization of information is one of the key ways in which we accomplish seemingly impossible things. A more detailed overview of both quantum indeterminacy and quantum entanglement as optimization techniques is given in The Simulation Hypothesis.

Any subject whose history ranges from pump handles on London's Broad Street, tide tables, naval gunfire and models of social segregation is bound to have rich parentage. It took 'a village' to beget computational epidemiology: as a true multi-disciplinary subject, it evolved at the crossroads of mathematics, computation, statistics and medicine, with some contributions from systems biology, virology, microbiology, game theory, geography and perhaps even the social sciences.

There is no longer a stage, not even the minimal illusion that makes events capable of adopting the force of reality~no more stage either of mental or political solidarity: what do Chile,Biafra, the boat people, Bologna, or Poland matter? All of that comes to be annihilated on the television screen. We are in the era of events without consequences (and of theories without consequences). There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. But that on which it has imposed its ephemeral reign, what it hoped to liquidate in order to impose the reign of the Enlightenment, that is, appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself.

The idea of cosmological inflation, or just inflation for short, was proposed by Alan Guth, now a physics professor from MIT, while he was working at the Stanford Linear Accelerator with his colleagues as a way to solve a number of problems with the existing theories of the origins of the universe. 57 The basic idea is that this inflationary period began very soon after the Big Bang (in this case, I mean very soon, from approximately 10-36 seconds after the to 10-32 seconds). That means the whole process of cosmic inflation started and ended before a single second had passed from the Big Bang! The insight that Guth and his colleagues had was that there was a period of repulsive gravity.

The multiverse idea is so common now in the world of physics that physicists have proposed not just one but many types of multiverses. The one that was most interesting to me, given my previous research into simulation theory, was the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics, also known as the parallel universe theory, or the quantum multiverse for short. It is a well-respected explanation for the mystifying phenomenon of quantum indeterminacy by many physicists. In this interpretation, the universe is spinning off new branches every time a quantum measurement is made, resulting in an almost infinite number of parallel universes with some level of shared history.

The idea of cosmological inflation, or just inflation for short, was proposed by Alan Guth, now a physics professor from MIT, while he was working at the Stanford Linear Accelerator with his colleagues as a way to solve a number of problems with the existing theories of the origins of the universe. 57 The basic idea is that this inflationary period began very soon after the Big Bang (in this case, I mean very soon, from approximately 10-36 seconds after the to 10-32 seconds). That means the whole process of cosmic inflation started and ended before a single second had passed from the Big Bang! The insight that Guth and his colleagues

The worst that can happen is that you die,

This reality is the real reality to you and I.

Anxiety becomes peace. You become more serene, more grateful, and more inspired by your life and your reality. It’s such a gift to get to exist.

Another weird thing I experienced a while back:

Even physical barriers can be broken. You can find a way to do anything.

Socialism has been a ruling-class production all along. That’s a fact, not a theory.

the mind-boggling bit is that the theory hints that the entire universe is just two-dimensional information on a cosmological horizon and that everything we think we see in three dimensions is really as much an illusion as a 3D movie, and it could all be a simulation. So really, the world (and everything) might be flat after all. And then again it might not be.)

Analysis is itself perhaps the decisive element of the immense process of the freezing over of meaning. The surplus of meaning that theories bring, their competition at the level of meaning is completely secondary in relation to their coalition in the glacial and four-tiered operation of dissection and transparency. One must be conscious that, no matter how the analysis proceeds, it proceeds toward the freezing over of meaning, it assists in the precession of simulacra and of indifferent forms. The desert grows.

Revolutionary theory also enshrined the living utopian hope that the State would wither away, and that the political sphere would negate itself as such, in the apotheosis of a finally transparent social realm. None of this has come to pass. The political sphere has disappeared, sure enough - but so far from doing so by means of a self-transcendence into the strictly social realm, it has carried that realm into oblivion with it. We are now in the transpolitical sphere; in other words, we have reached the zero point of politics, a stage which also implies the reproduction of politics, its endless simulation. For everything that has not successfully transcended itself can only fall prey to revivals without end. So politics will never finish disappearing - nor will it allow anything else to emerge in its place. A kind of hysteresis of the political reigns. Art has likewise failed to realize the utopian aesthetic of modern times, to transcend itself and become an ideal form of life. (In earlier times, of course, art had no need of self-transcendence, no need to become a totality, for such a totality already existed - in the shape of religion.) Instead of being subsumed in a transcendent ideality, art has been dissolved within a general aestheticization of everyday life, giving way to a pure circulation of images, a transaesthetics of banality. Indeed, art took this route even before capital, for if the decisive political event was the strategic crisis of 1929, whereby capital debouched into the era of mass trans politics, the crucial moment for art was undoubtedly that of Dada and Duchamp, that moment when art, by renouncing its own aesthetic rules of the game, debouched into the transaesthetic era of the banality of the image. Nor has the promised sexual utopia materialized. This was to have consisted in the self-negation of sex as a separate activity and its self-realization as total life. The partisans of sexual liberation continue to dream this dream of desire as a totality fulfilled within each of us, masculine and feminine at once, this dream of sexuality as an assumption of desire beyond the difference between the sexes. In point of fact sexual liberation has succeeded only in helping sexuality achieve autonomy as an undifferentiated circulation of the signs of sex. Although we are certainly in transition towards a transsexual state of affairs, this has nothing to do with a revolution of life through sex - and everything to do with a confusion and promiscuity that open the door to virtual indifference (in all senses of the word) in the sexual realm.

The full-blown, the absolute catastrophe would be a true omnipresence of all networks, a total transparency of all data - something from which, for now, computer viruses preserve us. Thanks to them, we shall not be going straight to the culminating point of the development of information and communications, which is to say: death. These viruses are both the first sign of this lethal transparency and its alarm signal. One is put in mind of a fluid travelling at increasing speed, forming eddies and anomalous countercurrents which arrest or dissipate its flow. Chaos imposes a limit upon what would otherwise hurtle into an absolute void. The secret disorder of extreme phenomena, then, plays a prophylactic role by opposing its chaos to any escalation of order and transparency to their extremes. But these phenomena notwithstanding, we are already witness to the beginning of the end of a certain way of thinking. Similarly, in the case of sexual liberation, we are already witness to the beginning of the end of a certain type of gratification. If total sexual promiscuity were ever achieved, however, sex itself would self-destruct in the resulting asexual flood. Much the same may be said of economic exchange. Financial speculation, as turbulence, makes the boundless extension of real transactions impossible. By precipitating an instantaneous circulation of value - by, as it were, electrocuting the economic model - it also short-circuits the catastrophe of a free and universal commutability - such a total liberation being the true catastrophic tendency of value.

D-Theory of Time, or Digital Presentism, gives us a coherent picture of temporal ontology: In the absence of observers, the arrow of time doesn’t exist -- there’s no cosmic flow of time. In fact, if we are to create high fidelity first-person simulated realities with experiential time predicated on reversible quantum computing for multiplayer virtualities, D-Theory of Time gives us a clear-cut guiding principle for doing just that.

Simulation theory. If sentient life forms, humans for instance, invent a computer, and that technology becomes advanced enough to simulate a universe, the odds of such a simulation being created are incredibly high. If the humanity inside the simulation in turn becomes advanced enough to simulate the universe, there would likely be a simulation inside the simulation. That simulation is bound to have a simulation inside it, as well. Those simulations would simulate the entire universe, so the individual life forms inside the simulation would act like ones that actually existed. The simulated people would be unlikely to realize they were being simulated.

You never get used to the feeling of hot metal, entering your skull and exiting through the back of your head. It’s simulated in glorious detail. A burning train through your forehead, a warm spray of blood and brain on your shoulders and back, the sudden chill – and finally, the black, when things stop. The Archons of the Dilemma Prison want you to feel it. It’s educational. The Prison is all about education. And game theory: the mathematics of rational decision-making. When you are an immortal mind like the Archons, you have time to be obsessed with such things. And it is just like the Sobornost – the upload collective that rules the Inner Solar System – to put them in charge of their prisons. We play the same game over and over again, in different forms. An archetypal game beloved by economists and mathematicians. Sometimes it’s chicken: we are racers on an endless highway, driving at each other at high speeds, deciding whether or not to turn away at the last minute. Sometimes we are soldiers trapped in trench warfare, facing each other across no-man’s-land. And sometimes they go back to basics and make us prisoners – old-fashioned prisoners, questioned by hard-eyed men – who have to choose between betrayal and the code of silence. Guns are the flavour of today. I’m not looking forward to tomorrow.

BUT: if this non-Euclidean universe is now the universe of power, it has also become the universe of counter-power. This reversion is much more radical than a negation; the antagonism is capable of turning the weapons of this new power against it, and especially of turning the weapons of power against themselves. The rules of hegemony are turned against it, through a force that contests it radically, in accordance with its own principles (and not only, like Marx in his time, according to historical contradictions while implicitly remaining faithful to the principle of reality and economic principles - to which his theory ends up succumbing). That is why this is not a historical revolution but a kind of anthropological mutation, and while there is no revolution thinkable in the context of the current hegemonic power, there is nothing beyond this "non-Euclidean" counter-power.

The automatic carriage-return on the typewriter, electronic central locking of cars: these are the things that count. The rest is just theory and literature. Space is what prevents everything from being in the same place. Language is what prevents everything from meaning the same thing. My hand, separated from me, dreams it is holding a breast. Nothing fills a hand better than a breast. Stereotype of a sadistic tenderness. This journal develops, as its title indicates, over the course of time. However it is haunted by something which preceded it, the secret underlying event.

Such is the paradox of all thought which disputes the validity of the real: when it sees itself robbed of its own concept. Events, bereft of meaning in themselves, steal meaning from us. They adapt to the most fantastical hypotheses, just as natural species and viruses adapt to the most hostile environments. They have an extraordinary mimetic capacity: no longer is it theories which adapt to events, but the reverse. And, in so doing, they mystify us, for a theory which is verified is no longer a theory. It's terrifying to see the idea coincide with the reality. These are the death-throes of the concept. The epiphany of the real is the twilight of its concept. We have lost that lead which ideas had over the world, that distance which meant that an idea remained an idea. Thought has to be exceptional, anticipatory and at the margin -- has to be the projected shadow of future events. Today, we are lagging behind events. They may sometimes give the impression of receding; in fact, they passed us long ago. The simulated disorder of things has moved faster than we have. The reality effect has succumbed to acceleration --anamorphosis of speed. Events, in their being, are never behind themselves, are always out ahead of their meaning. Hence the delay of interpretation, which is now merely the retrospective form of the unforeseeable event.

Because blunders were a tributary of spontaneity, and without it, they would vanish like an illusion. In this respect, Actyn might have gone too far, and he might now be entering the arena where all his efforts were automatically sterile. Ever since he had decided to turn all his firepower against Dr. Aira and his Miracle Cures, he had burned through stages, unable to stop because of the very dynamic of the war, in which he was the one who took every initiative. In reality, he had overcome the first stages — those of direct confrontation, libel, defamation, and ridicule — in the blink of an eye, condemned as they were to inefficiency. Actyn had understood that he could never achieve results in those terrains. The historical reconstruction of a failure was by its very nature impossible; he ran the risk of reconstituting a success. He then moved on (but this was his initial proposition, the only one that justified him) to attempts to produce the complete scenario, to pluck one out of nothingness . . . He had no weapons besides those of performance, and he had been using them for years without respite. Dr. Aira, in the crosshairs, had gotten used to living as if he were crossing a minefield, in his case mined with the theatrical, which was constantly exploding. Fortunately they were invisible, intangible explosions, which enveloped him like air. Escaping from one trap didn’t mean anything, because his enemy was so stubborn he would set another one; one performance sprung from another; he was living in an unreal world. He could never know where his pursuer would stop, and in reality he never stopped, and at nothing. Actyn, in his eyes, was like one of those comic-book supervillains, who never pursues anything less than world domination . . . the only difference being that in this adventure it was Dr. Aira’s mental world that was at stake. But, according to the law of the circle, everything flowed into its opposite, and the lie moved in a great curve toward the truth, theater toward reality . . . The authentic, the spontaneous, were on the reverse side of these transparencies.

What is the nature of this confusing way station between birth and (usually) death accompanied by obliteration of identity we call home? Planet, plane, simulation, hallucination, hell, heaven on earth … The hypotheses as to this realm’s true character are as many as there are bored conspiracy theorists tapping away on crusty laptops in their parents’ basements. But what if the childishly simple answer to our conundrum is given away in this aphorism popularized in ‘Row Row Row Your Boat’: ‘Life is but a dream’?

Imagine for a moment that our waking life is truly but a dream, a meticulously crafted simulation of sorts designed to test the limits of our perception and self-awareness.

A sudden sense of déjà vu, a feeling of being secretly observed, a recurring dream that seems eerily factual. What if these aren’t the misfirings of our own warped brains, random occurrences with no deeper meaning? What if they’re actually subtle hints, whispers from the multiverse urging us to question our reality?

If our senses can so easily deceive us, how can we be confident in our understanding of anything, even our own physical existence?

If we’re indeed, like Neo in THE MATRIX, “living in a dream world,” the inevitable questions then become: Can we wake up? If so, how do we wake up? What exactly awaits us if and when we do wake up?

What if the world we inhabit—with all its confounding complexities and contradictions—is nothing more than an elaborate stage set, a grand illusion orchestrated by a poorly understood force? If this were true, how could we possibly know for certain? What signs or signals might betray the actual nature of our world and our place in it?

To transcend this place, whatever, wherever and whenever it is, we must first travel inward through the wrinkles and folds of our own conscious, subconscious and unconscious minds. In doing so while utilizing specific techniques, it’s possible to amass enough energy, or personal power, to fly outward beyond the confines of this reality construct with our consciousness intact.

For anyone desiring to go beyond this world’s illusory limits, the most important thing is to avoid accepting anything anyone (including yours truly) asserts as ‘fact’ without personally testing it with an open mind … and heart.

The theory of constructed emotion and the classical view of emotion tell vastly different stories of how we experience the world. The classical view is intuitive—events in the world trigger emotional reactions inside of us. Its story features familiar characters like thoughts and feelings that live in distinct brain areas. The theory of constructed emotion, in contrast, tells a story that doesn’t match your daily life—your brain invisibly constructs everything you experience, including emotions. Its story features unfamiliar characters like simulation and concepts and degeneracy, and it takes place throughout the whole brain at once.

Atoms, the building blocks of so-called matter, however much they might seem to be physically circumscribed, aren’t actually like tiny billiard balls. That’s kindergarten science. From a shamanic or alchemical perspective, atoms are more like sentient waves, their intelligently responsive existence a blur of potential until they magically appear to materialize.

The observer effect puts our everyday perceptions and assumptions in a blender. It dictates—if we’re to be honest with ourselves, sober in our thinking, and not reactionary in our emotions—that the world we see is NOT the ultimate reality, but merely a projection of it. From this perspective the manifest world is revealed as what Hindu mystics referred to as maya, illusion, the imaginal outpourings of minds—like children naturally playing in magical constructs that seem eminently real—simply doing what minds do.

As we learn to appreciate the waltz of shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave, we begin to grasp that the solid ‘objects’ we think of as ourselves are merely illusions moving through a greater illusion.

This world is nothing more or less than an intricate dance of energy, a sea of swirling possibilities where everything is constantly in flux.

Activation-synthesis hypothesis argues that dreams are merely a product of random neural activity taking place in the brain stem, and that the cerebral cortex then attempts to make sense of the meaningless activity by forming thoughts and stories out of it. Other theories suggest that dreaming helps memory, learning, or forgetting unnecessary or harmful information, dreaming either being a primary or secondary phenomenon that arises out of these neurobiological processes. Theories like threat simulation theory and social simulation theory argue that dreams serve as sort of practice to develop one’s abilities and improve the likelihood of success in threatening events or important social situations.

The world can most definitely be changed, but not by using the materialist ways we’ve been taught designed to keep us beating our heads against the walls and bars of the ‘real world.’ To change this designedly dysfunctional construct, which our own co-opted creative attention is actually responsible for materializing and maintaining, we must first change ourselves.