Let’s take a serious right turn for a few minutes (or hours). I promised tangents and detours, so here comes one.
Fundamental to the concept of playing a simulated game is the understanding that there is a real game of baseball that is and has been played by real people in real places, and the statistics gathered from those events generate these outcomes I’ve been recreating (or reshaping, perhaps).
Lately, however, I started watching some videos and reading articles about the nature of reality. And what consciousness actually is. It’s quite a rabbit hole that science can take us down, and once these ideas get into your head you start to examine this human experience differently. Thanks to the YouTube algorithm, I’ve gone from curiosity about outer space to the question of whether space and time even exist.
I have long understood that our minds are incapable of grasping all the levels of what we experience as reality. We get glimpses of a different level sometimes, and we might label these as spiritual or intuitive or transcendental, because we need words somehow even when they do not suffice. I’ve known people who see auras or ghosts, for instance, and who am I to suggest they’re not? Maybe they can just tune into wavelengths I can’t.
Research has led Donald Hoffman, a professor of cognitive psychology at UC Irvine, to doubt our strongest held beliefs about what reality and consciousness are. I find his discoveries mind-bending but still compatible with my sense that we know only the tiniest fraction of reality anyway. Check out his TED Talk, “Do we see reality as it is?” and see if you can appreciate where he’s headed with this:
Intrigued by that talk, I let YouTube guide me to a conversation with Hoffman and Deepak Chopra. In my 20s, I read a couple of Chopra’s books and found they made a profound impact on my perception of reality and spirituality. My own exploration of spiritual teaching through a Jewish framework has led to this fundamental concept: We are spiritual beings having a human experience. I believe this can mesh with what Hoffman’s trying to prove with science, too.
The discussion with Chopra gave me added insight into Hoffman’s research and deepened my fascination. He’s arguing, essentially, that the way we believe we experience the world is no more the actual reality than double-clicking an icon on your computer desktop reflects the actual reality of how that file exists. He uses this interface model to show that what we experience and perceive is nothing more than a representation that conscious agents use as icons that mask reality. He doesn’t get into religion, but that rather jibes with spiritual beings having a human experience to me.
If reading a short interview will help grasp this better, check out “The Case Against Reality,” an interview in The Atlantic from 2016. He’s also written a book with that title since, and I suspect I’ll be ordering it shortly.
All that emboldened me to watch a 2 hour, 24 minute one-on-one interview Hoffman did called This Scientist Explains Why Our Reality Is False, because I wanted to get even greater insight into this way of thinking. I confess that I’m beginning to be rather persuaded that he might just be right, which then leads me to wonder what that means for us.
At a Jewish spirituality retreat a couple years ago, I made this note in my notepad: “If God is a spiritual being, and we are created in God’s image, then we are not physical beings at all.” That notion predates pretty much all of what we know in modern science and psychology. I’m amazed that here I am seeing that on a clearer level after listening to a scientist explain how he’s proven mathematically that our reality is false. And people think science and religion are incompatible?
Yet, whatever we believe or perceive as reality, we do still experience reality in this way. I just ate a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, and it was as delicious as ever, even if it’s possible to prove that there’s no such thing as taste or peanut butter or chocolate or my own senses. I might eat another one just to be sure, though.
If you’re intrepid, feel free to give this one a watch, too. I see several more out there on YouTube that will soon enough be recommended to me. I’ll no doubt revisit this rabbit hole, because it’s pretty mind-blowing to think there is not only no computer that I’m typing this on, there is also no one out there reading any of this, nor do any of the people I think I’m playing sim games against exist, nor does the game of baseball, nor the servers that are out there recreating games.
Of course, it’s possible all that is wrong, too, so just in case I’d better set my lineups and rotations for my next set of games. And even if I’m only a conscious agent living a simulated existence playing simulated games, I might as well try to win.
See you after the next series. Whatever that is.