Lets Get MetaPhysical, Meta… Physical. Let me hear your body talk… literally hear your body because your mind must send signals to your nervous system to contract meat and make your meat parts vibrate which makes the air vibrate which makes tiny meat parts and bone parts in my ear vibrate which sends more electrical signals to my mind which is also made of meat that was recently pushed from its normal place by an imbalance of blood and fluids inside my skull causing ICP. Let me hear your body talk because it is the only way that your mind can communicate with my mind.

There is not yet a way that technology has figured out to directly connect your mind’s electrical impulses directly to my mind so that I don’t have to go through this round about physical and meat-flapping way of hearing your body talk. I want to hear your mind talk directly to my mind.

Actually, I’m wrong! There has been invented a technology to do just that— directly connect our minds without using our bodies to vibrate meat. We’re doing that right now, through some amazing invention called writing that another rotted meat brain long ago had figured out. We will never know the names of those meat brains, but their idea of writing will carry on forever because it is such a good idea. In that way, those anonymous and unknown meat brains will always be with us and be a part of us.

And so, don’t mourn for me if I should pass away which might happen at any time now for me, but may happen to any one of us, even you. Perhaps the odds of it happening to me are slightly higher for me than for you. But know that it is still non-zero for you. That is what I now know to be true for myself. Even though unlikely, it could still happen to you all the same. You should learn that sobering fact for yourself and act accordingly. If you’ve played any poker, you’ll know that the odds defy what you think should happen all of the time. It is quite common, at least exactly as common as its exact probability.

Think of this weird fact. Even though I have a somewhat higher chance of dying before you do, if enough people read this blog, then there is a greater chance of one of my readers will die before I do. What are the chances that reader is you? I don’t know. That depends on the other readers and how many there are and their individual probabilities. But bottom line; it could be you. Are you feeling metaphysical yet? Are you thinking about yourself as a non-physical entity who could simply cease to be right now at this very moment? That’s what I have been going through for the last few weeks since the “event”— I still think that is a dumb word for it. There was no post-event like burning man decompression or nearly dead man decompression. There was a lot of physical therapy which is not the same as mental therapy or decompression. There was a lot of physically getting my brain retrained to do things a normal adult human being should be able do. But there was not much explaining or soothing of the mind. I suppose that is what religion is for.

But religion, for me, or I should say, for my mind, is not my favorite thing. It is not suited to my tastes. However, I have met some wonderful older people at my time at the adult care facility for whom religion is a wonderful thing. I will write about them later. But for now, I want to focus on my metaphysical experiences so that if you’re like me, and religion has not latched onto to your brain like a vicious schnauzer for whatever reason, then maybe you need something else. It is not as soothing as various metaphysical concepts in a well-established religion, but it is at least an explanation of what’s happening. And when you’re very confused and are obstinately refusing to adhere to any religion’s explanation of what’s happening, then maybe you will find a somewhat plausible explanation soothing. I think that I myself would have, but I had to come find this route by myself. If you find yourself in similiar circumstances in unknown territory knowing that you will soon cease to exist, then maybe it could be comforting to remember this route and perhaps it may offer some understanding and hence some comfort to a naturally skeptical, but logical and otherwise open mind. Note that I am not proclaiming this to be the answer to life, the universe, and everything. It is simply a result that my meat brain produced given the inputs it has received thus far. I’m very skeptical of how our meat brains do their jobs, and so
I’d prefer an explanation of what’s happening to me in terms that I already understand. And those terms are reliant upon things that I already know well, namely science and computing. And so, in the next few paragraphs and posts, I will be giving you a first hand account of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything from a fractured mind. Given the flaws inherent in a piece of meat, much less a known-to-be broken piece of meat, take what I’m about to “say” with a healthy dose of skepticism.

I like that I can “say” this to you without causing my meat flaps to vibrate the air to vibrate your ear’s meat parts. In this way, I inhabit your meat brain. Now that you have read these words, I have created the same stimulus in your brain as if your ear parts had actually been vibrated by the air. It is an amazing feat of technology greater than all of the recent advances in virtual reality, although to be fair, virtual reality does in fact have technology to vibrate the air near your ears to vibrate the meat in your ears. In fact, if you know me personally and know my voice and demeanor, then perhaps I am now currently inside your meat brain creating images and sounds by manipulating signals in your brain to create a localized personal facsimile of my image and voice. What an amazing technology! Writing is the original virtual reality.

And so, even if I should cease to be right now as you’re reading this, I live on as a simulation in your brain. Just like the original meat brains who invented writing, my idea will continue through you and on and on perhaps for as long as there are meat brains and perhaps even beyond meat brains if the meat brains ever figure out how consciousness works and creates an “artificial” one… “artificial” being a most meat-biased kind of word to mean non-biological consciousness. If all of the meat brains die out as mine shall, if not sooner then later, I could perhaps still live as a voice or simulation in non-biological minds. This very sentence is infecting your fertile meat brain space right now and could further infect other consciousnesses until the end of time. If that happens, what does being alive really mean? What does it mean to die to expire to cease to exist? Did I really cease to exist if these words echo and echo forever throughout all of the meat space now and on into the future and on and on through other “artificial” consciousnesses and on to other advanced forms of networked consciousnesses that we cannot even fathom at this
point in our primitive development.

I suppose it means that “I”, the current biological entity will no longer be able to produce new ideas and react to them. The current me will have its connections severed from my body. I can still think of moving my body parts, but they won’t respond. And stimulus from the meat will no longer reach my mind. Vibrations from my ear cannot become words and ideas in my mind. Any copies of me will be connected to a /different sensory organ. Future versions of me could be simulations or replications, but won’t be exactly me. However, there is an even stranger possibility.

And that is that the current “I” is in fact a simulation of me… a me that once existed as a
physical being long long ago. And the current “I” is an echo of that. It is a copy of the original or a copy of another simulation such that “I” can react to newly created ideas and create new ideas based on those new ideas, although perhaps with different sensory appartus. Who would go to such elaborate lengths to produce such a simulation? Well, you could just as well say, why does humanity go to such lengths to make more babies and teach them reading and writing? It is just something they do. They have created a fertile meat-mind space in which reading and writing can spread and prosper forever. In the same way, these minds may create future non-biological minds that reproduce and prosper for the mere purpose of doing that and simply existing as a mind which is a wonderful thing to be. And all of us today, could be “ideas” or “words” inside of those vastly more capable minds. It is simply that we are more refined and more accurate in our simulation than mere words. Although my words created a simulation in your own hardware in your own mind, it was perhaps not as accurate as it could be. My voice and intonation are not directly carried with mere words on a blog.
What would it take to make it more accurate? More data? More technology? More ideas? More mind- space? Perhaps minds in the future, or even more strangely, in the past, have figured it out. And what we are as minds and entities is that we’re actually some ideas that have been propagated through time and space for a very long time from a long dead civilization that had reached a point of creating consciousnesses that could reproduce and were self-sustainable.

However, don’t think of yourself as a simulation. You are possibly a word in a great conversation or a movie or a political debate in a group of individuals’ minds. You are being exchanged between minds more powerful and more different than we could possibly imagine with our limited simulation abilities. You will live on forever in this manner, though you will no longer be able to interact and react in your current mind which we call our “world” any longer. In religions, we call this sort of existing beyond the material world, a soul or a spirit. In Dawkins’ book, he called such a thing a meme, which is a word that has taken on a different meaning in the age of the internet. But he meant it as a self-replicating chunk of information and made a biological parallel to a gene.

I think this is the right direction, but that perhaps there are still other explanations that can go further. I don’t think that our simulations are memes in the Dawkins’ sense which fight out an evolutionary battle to survive. I think the answer is simpler. If we are simulations, we are more akin to words on a blog page than to genes in a biological entity. There is no need to fight and compete with others for survival. All of the blog pages can exist and be ready to be read just as all of the information currently now contained in computers can easily be entire contained in many human-like minds or greater. We can extract all of reading and writing from human minds without considering how much memory space that takes. A copy of me now exists in you after you’ve read this far. It is a sublimated and simplified copy of me, but it is a copy of my ideas, and if that is what is important about me, then it is effectively me anyway. If what is relevant about me is my mind and how it interacts with yours, then this interaction through writing is not that much different than talking with me which is what I often prefer to do when in the physical presence of others anyway.

Now, a few of you may miss the physical presence of me for physical reasons. But really, I am a somewhat average chunk of meat and you can find a suitable physical replacement of me to wrap your meat arms around. If you cannot find a suitable person, I would suggest a dog because they are nice things to wrap your meat arms around if you are still able. However, a dog cannot have my mind within its meat brain. And so, even with a dog, you will not be able to replicate the significant thing about me which is my mind. But, that is not true, because it is within all of our minds’ power to reproduce any other mind and imagine its existence and predict its actions. And therefore, as simple and as flawed as that simulation of me might be, it is still there, and for that reason, I will always be with you and will continue to affect you in ways that you cannot understand today.

But you may also take comfort that perhaps we never existed at all. That physical reality is an illusion anyway. We are all words in a great conversation or composition of ideas or a movie or a play or a poem or a song. It doesn’t matter exactly what. We are all important parts of a dialog. People who come from a religious background can sometimes feel a greater purpose to things. Perhaps they know that they are a crucial word that is a turning point in a movie. Perhaps they do have a greater purpose. Perhaps their lives are conveying a greater idea in a language that we as creatures are too simplistic to ever understand. But perhaps we can still sense the context in our word and our purpose in the greater conversation. Perhaps we will never find other intelligent creatures because we are a language and not a universe at all.

So, with that concept, we can derive a few ideas that can offer some satisfaction in life without a religious explanation.

One, it is important that you do what you do. You are a precise simulation in a precise language in a precise dialog. You keep being you, whatever that means. Be yourself and be true to yourself. You are your own word in the great dialog. Your actions have meaning to more than the other actors near you. Their thoughts on what you do are not relevant to the meaning of the dialog. They are also a part of the dialog. But perhaps they are supporting actors and you are main actor making the main point. You are the noun and the verb and they are the adjectives and adverbs to help describe you. They are necessary for that purpose and provide extra meaning to you. But if you change yourself, you change the whole meaning of the sentence. In fact, if they succeed in changing you, then perhaps you are a pun or some sort of play on words meant to amuse the audience. If that’s so, that’s okay too because that was your purpose in the great dialog. Are you funny or sad or crazy? That is part of the emotion that you are conveying in the subtext of the great dialog. It is perhaps unfortunate for you personally. but it is of great import to the listeners of the great dialog to sense your emotions. It is all a part of the communications and an art greater than what we could understand. Maybe you are part of a dialog. Maybe you are a part of a song. If you changed or disappeared, you will be missed by the listeners. Maybe that’s why quantum mechanics is so sensitive to whether there are listeners or observers to actions. It is a part of the structure of the language.

Later on, I’ll described what actually happened to me that I remember that led me to this conclusion. It is perhaps as fascinating, if not more, than this blog post, because it is based on an actual experience. So, all of the above is speculation, but the experiences I had previously in this incident which for now I’ll call “Atheist hell” led me to the insights above, and those previous experiences are true and not speculation. And I can describe how the experiences led me to the speculation above and you can see the logic in the train of thought, which I think is important for people to inspect, especially logically minded people who work with computers and need to inspect how things work in order to verify the truth of some fundamental thing that does not work in order to fix it. In order to fix something, we must understand its chain of causality which I will provide later in case some other person has a similar experience. Then, we can match up data with events and provide a more accurate picture of what an objective reality is. For now, I provide my description as a single data point around which new data points and new speculation may attach itself. The data I will provide in that future post will loosely correlate with actual events happening to my physical brain at the time. It is my hope that others in my situation can provide more data to add to the expanse of knowledge so that we may gain a fuller picture of human biological consciousness. It is a fascinating topic on which there has been much speculation and thought, but little data. I am offering a little of speculation and a little data to go with it. Maybe this can be of use to somebody and can help further the ideas in this area.