As I described in my previous post: The Fabulous World of Pantodragon, my understanding is that life is, to all intents and purposes, a video game. But carry the usual Play Station version forward a little, and think of something more like a flight simulator, or, better, the kind of simulators some trainee-surgeons get to use when learning to do operations. In the latter they wear helmets and gloves so that their senses of sight and hearing, and touch in their hands, are cut off from the real world, and they can only hear, see and touch things in the virtual operating theatre. If the virtual-reality generator was good enough, they should be unable to distinguish between ‘reality’ and ‘virtual reality’.
There are a number of sci-fi films that have explored, and illustrated, this idea. One that comes to mind is ‘EXISTENCE’, in which they have biological video game modules which the players plug into sockets that have been surgically inserted into their spines. When they are plugged into a game the game-data over-rides and blocks anything else coming down their nervous system from their own sense organs and so they experience the game in just the same way as they experience the real world. In other words, they have no way of being able to tell if what they are experiencing is the game world or the real world. The film plays on this confusion.
At the simplest, most obvious level, most people have had dreams such that they have had trouble deciding whether the event of the dream really happened or not, and maybe sometimes they never can decide. I dreamt once that I had gone to the toilet, and I only know that it was a dream because when I woke up I still needed to go to the toilet. How is that possible? Because we literally DO live in virtual-reality worlds.
The fact is that we do not experience the ‘real’ world directly. Take seeing, for example. An image of what one is looking at forms on the back of the eye, and that is then turned into an electrical signal that is sent to the brain. The brain then RECONSTRUCTS the experience of seeing. All the other senses are the same. Everything we experience is a virtual reality constructed by the brain out of the data coming from our senses. So, there really is NO EVIDENCE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF A REAL, CORPOREAL WORLD, no evidence that life is anything more than a dream, and, in fact, what we EXPERIENCE very definitely IS a dream, or virtual reality. One might even go so far as to say that it goes against common sense to suppose that there IS a real, material world, because we have no experience of it – it is just that we have such a long acquaintance with the idea, that we are fed on it from the cradle, that everybody else believes it etc etc. That is what makes it seem so plausible.
So all you have to do to arrive at the total virtual reality version of existence that I have described, is to replace the ‘real world’ with another mind as the source of the information that the mind uses to construct its experience of the world. One might even say it is the ‘simplest’, most obvious assumption, as it leaves us thinking in terms of minds, and thoughts, with which we are familiar, and one does not have to add the extra stuff about material substance – which creates all sorts of problems when one then works backwards and tries to conceptualise what one then means by ‘mind’, and ‘consciousness’ etc.
I mean, we have learned to take the ‘real’ world so ‘for real’ that we, for the most part, have lost sight of the fact that what IS actually ‘real’ for us is our thoughts and sensations and feeling and the like. When I touch something I have the ‘sensation’ of solidity, that is all. If I chose to believe in a real, solid world, then I am postulating that that ‘sensation’ is caused by an object in some real, solid world; I have to actually POSTULATE the existence of a ‘real’ world.
Then I give myself a problem: I know I exist, I have a mind and thoughts, but I now have to ask what they are made of, what are thoughts and how can something as disembodied as thoughts interact with the ‘real’ world. I mean, thoughts are not magnetic, they do not have mass and so on, so how can they interact with physical ‘matter’, for it is by virtue of these properties that objects in the real world interact with one another.
There have been many attempts to solve this conundrum. These range from the proposal that there are two, parallel universes, that of physical reality, and that of mind and thought, and that they, somewhat mysteriously, run synchronously with one another so that they do not have to interact, to the extreme position of denying the existence of mind and thought altogether. To do that one postulates that things like consciousness are merely attributes of the complexity of ‘life chemistry’; ie as molecules and molecular systems get more and more complex, they acquire more and more ‘properties’, more and more abilities, and consciousness is just a property of molecular systems of sufficient complexity.
Although one is tempted to associate this sort of stuff with Rene Descartes, the idea that ‘life is a dream’ goes way back. There are a number, (I do not know how common it was) of so-called primitive tribes or societies that believed that life was a dream. There is even one present day society – I can’t remember which or where – that believes so strongly in dreams that if a person dreams that another man steals some of his cabbages then he can bring a suit against him and the offender will be held liable to pay compensation. This is not daft when one thinks about the interpretability of dreams. If you dream that someone steals something from you then that really did happen; it is just not literally cabbages – I mean, people steal from each other all the time: ideas, or someone might ‘steal your thunder’, or ‘steal the show’ etc. For example, that last might be represented in dreams thus: you might own a ‘show’ such as a fairground, or circus or something, and someone comes along and steals it from you. The person who steals it from you might be someone known to you, or might not, but one should not be literal in one’s interpretation of who the guilty party is.