Reality vs "Sims"

The comments below from another tread prompted me to share some thoughts in a new post. Perhaps others have pondered similar concepts, it is unusual to find places to share these ideas in RL.






I'm not familiar with the articles, but have had similar thoughts. As simming is evolving to be more and more realistic, could it eventually become real or even evolve beyond real (things are possible in sims that are not possible in RL).

Perhaps the "big bang" that created the universe was a sim crash that we all got stuck in.

The well accepted thermodynamics principal of "entropy" would indicate that life must evolve beyond its physical form if it is to continue to survive.

"Entropy = The tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity".

Life as we know it feeds off of the flow of energy from an ordered to a disordered state (entropic). As the energy concentrations in the universe disipate, the energy flow that life feeds off of will diminish and eventually stop.

THE MATRIX IS HERE!!

Dang this makes me think about that story I read when I was 8 about infinite posibilities of a multi verse.
Where our Universe was contained within the mere smoke particle off a ships engine within another reality.
Where that ships universe was contained on a mere ash of that reality and on and on and on and on and through death we evolve to the next plane of existance.
Eventually making it to the final one.....but again that was almost 30 years ago...Ironic it comes back to play now.

Shadow

LOL, Shadow - I had a very similar experience as a child. I often thought that I was the only "real" being and that everything around me was "imaginary" or illusory. I don't recall specifics, but I also remember seeing Horton Hears a Who on TV, and thinking that it somehow led credence to my paranoia. Guess I'll dust off my copy of The Elegant Universe and refresh my memory banks. Cool topic.

Shadow Weaver;

Interesting idea. A slightly different take on reincarnation.

*phew* Guess I wasn't the only weird kid out there...

Now you guys are going to make me try to find that book again. Im wanting to say it came out of the series from Eon by Greg Bear or Demons at Rainbows edge but I cant remember exactly.

hehehe same here! That Horton Hears a Who book messed me up......and ever read The Borrowers? Those teeny tiny ppls who live in your house and "borrow" stuff. Like that sock that "disappears" from the dryer, that ink pen you can't find, even your car keys LOL!

And for you writers out there lets NOT EVEN get into Fornits.......

But yeah I've always had that "dreaming I was a butterfly or butterfly dreaming it was me" thing going on....

OH and I remember a short story I read in Fantasy & SciFi mag...something about how our world was just the dream of a tiny god who lived inside a young girl, and he had to be kept slumbering, cuz everytime he got disturbed, things in our world would change - land masses going poof, and E=mc2 got changed to E=mc1.77899 or something LOL!
(dang now I gotta go dig up that story!)

Very cool thread

You have too much time on your hands Arch.

LOL that reminds me of another one about a guy who developed an anti grav rod and because of it built an infinite purpulsion engine for a car but when he turned it off the car started floating away.

Then because the government was after him cause he had developed infinte electric generators with the rod that would power homes the gov't was loosing money so they wanted to put a can on his product.

So all the people he helped converted their cars and VW Buses into space craft and headed out to set up a colony on the moon ...was very intriguing short book ...like 100 pages I believe ....Wanting to say it was and Isaac Asmov story.

Shadow

Moved to Off-Topic for further discussion.

LOL! I'm pretty sure that story is posted up on the Baen Free Library, Anti-Grav Unlimited by Duncan Long.

I think in your other post you're thinking of Demons at Rainbow Bridge, by Jack L Chalker, where our entire universe was an unintended consquence of the activation of an FTL engine in another universe... the Devil turned out to be the chief engineer, and God... well, he was the first officer of the ship.

Greg Bear's Eon also dealt with an artificial universe called the Way. It was an odd one, since it was an infinitely long cylinder pinned around an infinitely long, perfectly reflective singularity called the Flaw (I just love that term for it, I dunno why).

I just finished reading The Elegant Universe, actually... and the more I think about string theory, the more it seems like some sort of weird computing system. Mebbe we are in some sort of wacky simulation. Makes you wonder what happens to us when we do cack it, huh? Do we get to reload from our last quicksave? Reminds me of an old ad for a Star Trek computer game:

Kirk: "Spock! I thought you were dead!"
Spock: "I rebooted, Jim."

Hehe...

Not at all Billy, I just feel compelled to try and understand the universe we live in. I think a lot about it and I'm interested in just about everything.

Do physicists have too much time on thier hands? Did you know that the man who created Second Life has a degree in physics? I'm sure he has spent some time pondering the nature of reality.

Ok... so where were all you guys when I was growing up?? LOL Seems like all I got to hang around with were the barbie loving princess speaking pink unicorn lovers LOL

Have you read *Sophie's World*? That's more or less the feeling I had when I was growing up, then you have bills, work, life in general and seems like you stop... thinking

Leilany

Hehe Leilany! I was sorta lucky aside from the years spent overseas, I grew up in Berkeley CA - lota weirdo kids and families there - I didn't stick out much in the crowd.

HOWEVER I remember freaking out my 4th grade teacher - the first assignment she gave was to write about our Summer - and I wrote about taking a vacation in my inner landscape LMAO

sheesh she did NOT appreciate my early scifi leanings at ALL rofl

Oh yah havnt read Sophie's World - but I remember A Wrinkle in Time...another book that messed me up. well I was born weird, but it helped me along nicely

I remember vividly when I was 7 years old trying to figure out where the universe exactly was and I had a fear that it was in shoe box on a shelf in someone's closet. I tried to express this to my mother and she looked at me like I was crazy and has been looking at me that way ever since.

I remember flying in my dreams, very much like we can do now on SL. Also I often looked forward to going to sleep because I could to some degree program what kind of dream I'd have, such as "Big Rock Candy Mountain", or "Pirates", etc. Beyond that the dream took its own course.

Walt Disney really corrupted my reality.

Thanks Walt!

That is a cool take on reincarnation.

I recall another story, much less optimistic, about how life was seeded on earth and other nearby galaxys by a superior alien race. So that those planets would evolve, develope language, tool use, culture, politics, weapons, eventually nuclear power, and ultimately blow our selves up. All of the galaxys were designed to blow up at the same time so that they would spell out "Happy Birthday Emperor" in the night sky of the alien planet. Earth was the dot on the " i ".

Maybe thats what christians mean when they say you need to be "saved"... God's gunna reboot his crashing simulation, but first He let His Son make backups of all His favorite programs. ^_^

There was a movie based on this concept before the Matrix and I'm sure others have been done. The 13th Floor, I think. Now that I think about it, there was a scene where he went to the edge of their sim. Kinda like my first experience trying to fly to a place that was on the other side of an empty sim.... wth?!?!?

Yuh... in '98-'99 or so, we had:

The Matrix
Dark City
13th Floor
eXistenZ

All dealing with existential thoughtlines in some related, albeit different capacities.

Am I missing any more that came out around that timeframe?

I'm a big fan of time travel myself.

time travel rulz. i have a friend who believes she's living backwards through time.

*inner landscape* Shame most adults take the easy way out when they run into kids like that I was born in Venezuela, raised in New York City, and when my folks moved us back to Venezuela, all my so called *weirdness* was attributed to having been raised in the *city from hell* LOL

Hmm..sounds like Kurt Vonnegut

I loved A Wrinkle in Time. (My poorly configured gray matter is still trying to grasp the concept of a Tesseract. )