Something to Blow Your Mind

I wrote a short story a while back for a class I was taking, that I have since lost, but remember the premise of. The biggest thing I remember about my grade, which was a B+ if I remember right, is the note that my teacher wrote saying that the concept gave her a headache thinking about.

This was the story: A guy who is having a crisis of faith in God is sitting on the steps of his church when he prays to God to give him some guidance. A few minutes later two other guys come around the corner and ask him what he is doing. When the one sitting down explains his crisis, the two others offer to show him why his crisis is correct, and there really is no "God" in the way that everyone wants.

The two guys end up explaining that the entire universe as the other knows it is an experiment that the two cooked up. It turns out that the universe is only as big as a basketball to the two guys and is sitting on one of their desks in their house. They just have the ability to jump back and forth between their world and this world to check on their experiment.

But then what really freaks out the first guy out is when the two others show him that they have done it again here, and there is another world that they can jump down to. And that they can do this over and over and over.

The two guys' experiment is that space is so infinite and only based on perception that they could do this world jumping forever.

What do you think? Do you think that something like that could exist? I know there are some good science thinkers out there and be interesting to hear your opinions on it. I know it wouldn't be the same as the original, but I've been thinking about writing the story again.

I would ask the two guys: "How did you come to exist?"

The idea that our universe is just a simulation doesn't answer how the simulator comes to existence, just as religion doesn't explain how God (etc.) came to existence. So the question "Why or how is there anything at all" is never touched.

Sounds like a perfectly reasonable premise. If all we know or experience comes from our perception, then it is not necessary for space and time to be infinite, it is sufficient for us to perceive them as so. All our perceptions can be classed as simulated since the brain reinterprets all the signals it recieves. Eyes are not cameras, they do not record an image, they only send data to the brain which constructs an image based on that part of the data which it judges that will be useful to us, similarly ears are not microphones picking up every sound, we hear what evolution has taught us to hear. Pleasure and pain are the same signals, differently interpreted according to intensity and cirstance. It has to be this way, if the brain allowed through all the raw data, life would be a permanent acid trip.
To answer the question 'How come anything exists at all' we need Stephen Hawking back. It will be difficult to find another human brain with such immense processing power.

ihno said:

I would ask the two guys: "How did you come to exist?"

The idea that our universe is just a simulation doesn't answer how the simulator comes to existence, just as religion doesn't explain how God (etc.) came to existence. So the question "Why or how is there anything at all" is never touched.

Click to expand...

That is a good question that I hadn't thought of. That will give me a headache thinking about it.

dargelos said:

Sounds like a perfectly reasonable premise. If all we know or experience comes from our perception, then it is not necessary for space and time to be infinite, it is sufficient for us to perceive them as so. All our perceptions can be classed as simulated since the brain reinterprets all the signals it recieves. Eyes are not cameras, they do not record an image, they only send data to the brain which constructs an image based on that part of the data which it judges that will be useful to us, similarly ears are not microphones picking up every sound, we hear what evolution has taught us to hear. Pleasure and pain are the same signals, differently interpreted according to intensity and cirstance. It has to be this way, if the brain allowed through all the raw data, life would be a permanent acid trip.
To answer the question 'How come anything exists at all' we need Stephen Hawking back. It will be difficult to find another human brain with such immense processing power.

Click to expand...

"How come anything exists at all" is an abbreviated version of a metaphysical classic: "Why are there Beings at all and not rather Nothing?" - but I really don't understand why we should need a duly dead Stephen Hawkings back since Hawkings as far as I know was a theoretical physicist (= hence, a scientist) but not at all a philosopher-metaphysician.

This my non-understanding of this alleged need of Hawkings gets even stronger considering the fact that what dargelos serves us in his own argument is a slightly simplified and somewhat modernised version of good old Platonism, telling us - as always - that Reality, the Really Real Reality, resides somewhere "outside" and "above" the world of temporal sensual experience. Plato gave Reality the name the world of Ideas - unchanging eternal Ideas, but what name you give it isn't the important thing. The important thing is the dichotomy between Reality and temporal sensual experience. And the basic problem isn't perceptual but conceptual.

I can give an example connected to Hawking's famous book of popular science "A Brief History of Time". In this book he engages with the awfully bad idea to try to bash philosopher Immanuel Kant on Kant's own turf in a chapter of his most important book "Critique of Pure Reason". It's the chapter titled "The Antinomy of Pure Reason" in the section "Transcendental Dialectics".

Now in this chapter Kant develops an argument concerning the world in time and space, a thesis and an anti-thesis. The thesis says that the world has a beginning in time, and is also limited in regard to space.

The anti-thesis is of course the opposite: The world has no beginning, and no limits in space, but is, in relation to time and space, intimate.

Now Hawking clearly doesn't get Kant's point at all - he doesn't get why Kant has this thesis/anti-thesis argument, and even less gets the philosophical conclusion and point of it all, which is the following:

We get into the thesis/anti-thesis argument because of a fundamental misuse of the concepts of "world", "space" and "time". On the one hand we want to talk about the world-as-cosmic-totality, while at the same time using the world-as-a-thing in the world. Result: conceptual confusion.

Stephen Hawking could have learned a few important points from Kant.