After dealing with some health anxiety and fear around death and dying, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be conscious, living, or what even “real” is in the world.
Sometime ago, I read a theory that talked about how any particular moment in our universe is a single collapse of the measurable waves of subatomic particles into their known states. Before the measurement, we can only know their probability of being in a particular place. In a way, it’s like everything exists all at once in the universe but it only becomes certain (or ‘real’) through our observed, 4-dimensional, conscious experience. It trips me out every time I think about it.
What’s even more trippy is that, as AI creates new text and images that appear lifelike, maybe this itself is a kind of ‘wave function collapse’ that brings a single moment to life in an alternative universe.
Looking at it another way: when I see images or videos on social media, random people’s posts aren’t any more real to me than anything an AI could come up with. The only reason I know one thing is ‘real’ and another is imaginary is because we have specific neural pathways built to make us empathetic and socially connected and the way others view reality in turn shapes our known reality. That is to say: my brain connects what other humans say and do into a learned, shared reality as a form of social cohesion.
So basically all of reality outside ourselves is a construct of sensory input based on the collapse of probabilities into a single known reality at a precise moment in time that the neural network in our brains absorb and react to. The social portion of our gooy, all natural, neural network is what fills in any missing gaps and convinces our consciousness that what we’re sensing is real. In that way, nothing is real and everything is real at the same time. Even ‘artificial experiences’ (that is: VR or nervegear style experiences) could be just as real as anything that exists in the normal world.
I still haven’t decided if this view of the world helps calm my anxiety or makes it worse. Time will tell, I suppose.
Wow! Been feeling this for a week or so, then today I get served this by the Algorithm…
https://youtu.be/Z8I-aAN5LMw
It’s been about four months. This line of thinking has greatly increased my anxiety but I can’t exactly figure out why. If it’s true, it basically means that we’re living inside a simulation since everything you see as physical matter is simply an individual point of infinite waveforms condensed into a single pulse. It also might mean that I am truly the only conscious person, although it’s more likely that all life (including inanimate objects) are sharing a collective consciousness (the “Holy Spirit” part of the trinity that makes up all life in the Christian interpretation). Unfortunately, my brain keeps getting caught up in this question, even though it’s impossible to find out why this single-forward-facing-timeline universe exists. Even if I could get my limited human brain wrapped around what this universe really is, it doesn’t change the fact that I’m a limited human with a limited human existence and I’ll still need to provide for my bodily needs.
This is kinda far out, but what if this is going on with hundreds or thousands of people right now and what if this is the way that our collective, universal consciousness is working to ‘wake up’ in some kind of way that’s so much larger than any individual person.