Merging gradients of simulation and reality into dynamic concepts of simulated reality, 2022
Taylor Hinchliffe
Most attempts to bifurcate human experiences into reality or simulation are vulnerable to become riddled with inconsistencies since shifting the frame of reference may reshuffle the perspective and generate exceptions. This is perhaps because many experiences may be describable as both reality and simulation depending on the perspective at play. If our perspective is locked solely on collective direct human experience, the argument might be made either way: all experiences contain a slice of reality, or, all experiences — thoughts in particular — are neurally simulated pieces of a much larger reality, the concept of which is itself a simulation. Likewise, if our perspective focuses on collective knowledge structures, one might say that either all consistent understandings of the natural world are scaffolded upon abstractions outside of our experience (e.g. most atomic and subatomic behaviors) and are simulations if they are scaffolded on simulations, or, that all populations of patterns of human sensory awareness that are ‘temporally-stable’ and have the capacity to possess collective pattern commonalities, are real. And again, depending on the perspective, even the concept of populations of human sensory data patterns might be considered a thought simulation from one perspective since we are incapable of directly experiencing the sensory data of many humans at once, or, as a thought itself and thus as a genuinely real perturbation of direct experience from another perspective. In either case, it is worth making a real imprint on our senses and thought cycles by perturbing them with a linguistic simulation of collective minds and experiences as described with the term “universe” by Buckminster Fuller in Synergetics (1):
“301.10 Universe is the aggregate of all humanity's consciously apprehended and communicated nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping experiences.
302.00 Aggregate means sum-totally but nonunitarily conceptual as of any one moment. Consciousness means an awareness of otherness. Apprehension means information furnished by those wave frequencies tunable within man's limited sensorial spectrum. Communicated means informing self or others. Nonsimultaneous means not occurring at the same time. Overlapping is used because every event has duration, and their initiatings and terminatings are most often of different duration.1 Neither the set of all experiences nor the set of all the words used to describe them are instantly reviewable nor are they of the same length. Experiences are either involuntary (subjective) or voluntary (objective), and all experiences, both physical and metaphysical, are finite because each begins and ends.
303.00 Universe is the comprehensive, historically synchronous, integral- aggregate system embracing all the separate integral-aggregate systems of all men’s consciously apprehended and communicated (to self or others) nonsimultaneous, nonidentical, but always complementary and only partially overlapping, macro-micro, always-and- everywhere, omnitransforming, physical and metaphysical, weighable and unweighable event sequences. Universe is a dynamically synchronous scenario that is unitarily nonconceptual as of any one moment, yet as an aggregate of finites is sum-totally finite.“
Due to the dramatic changes that may accommodate shifts in perspective in an single mind and in populations of minds (e.g. throughout Buckminster Fuller’s “universe”), it is important to note that, in the context of reality versus simulation, these perspective shifts are typically filtered through language due to the inherit limitations of imposing the categorization of reality versus simulation. If a series of thoughts are generated from language, the perspective alluding to simulation would say that the thoughts of the reader or listener are likely to differ from the sequence of thoughts that generated in the original string of language, and are thus a simulation of the original sequence of thoughts (an attempt to imitate or reconstruct, without total accuracy). And yet the series of thoughts themselves may also be thought of as genuine and real perturbations of direct experience. Therefore, the same concept/experience may be thought of as a simulation or reality depending on the perspective, and may be shifted in a ‘gradiental’ manner, sometimes leaning more towards the definitions of a simulation or more towards the definitions of reality.
It is most likely that current linguistic attempts to describe and/or differentiate matters as complex as the collective interfaces and overlapping regions of all human sensory data patterns is simply insufficient, because the systems under scrutinization have significantly more dimensions and degrees of freedom than the degrees of freedom of the definitions of two words. Indeed, we may combine two separate quotes from Charles Howard Hinton’s “A New Era of Thought” (2) as follows:
A) “It is the structures and movements in the brain which the human being perceives.” And,
B) “...it may well be that the laws of our universe are the surface tensions of a higher universe.” Therefore, the brain structures and movements constituting the experiences of billions of humans and the near infinite degrees of freedom and possibility that result may be directly or indirectly interfacing with higher dimensional space. Perhaps the best we can do is, at the very least, grant ourselves the flexibility to increase the degrees of freedom of our language and permit systems to pass between one definition to another while being accommodative to new perspectives.
References:
1. Fuller, R. Buckminster. Synergetics: explorations in the geometry of thinking. Estate of R.
Buckminster Fuller, 1982.
2. Hinton, Charles Howard. A new era of thought. S. Sonnenschein & Company, 1888.