If you take the red pill, you get to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
If you take the blue pill, stop reading, and forget that you ever saw this blog post.
This isn't a joke. Think carefully before making your decision.
We live in the Matrix. Well, we live in A matrix, but it's almost exactly the same as the one in the movie. I don't mean a socially-constructed matrix, though it includes that, I'm talking about having your consciousness plugged into a computer-generated reality. The main difference between the the real one and the one in the movie is that it contains only one person -- you.
Imagine for a minute that you are a character from the movie who's been jacked out of the matrix. You have all the hardware you need to jack into the Matrix, namely the plug-in at the back of your skull. Imagine also that you have to operate a robot and the only way to operate it is to use the same equipment which allows you to enter the Matrix.
When you plug the robot's control wire into the back of your head, the reality you see is from it's point of view. It feeds information from it's camera and other senses through the jack and for all intents and purposes you are able to control the robot as if you were the robot. When you raise your arm, it's actually the robots arm moving as if it were your arm -- you feel the arm move as if it's your arm, and you see it as your own arm, but you know it's not because it's made of tubes of steel and has a heavy metal claw at the end.
Now consider what would happen if you were a normal person whose brain had been separated from their body, except all the neural connections remained intact and made longer. You could hold your brain in your own hands and look at it. But, the "you" that looked at your brain would only be your body and sense organs, the actual "you" is the brain, and in fact, the reality you experience as you held your own brain in your hands would be happening inside it.
The one-man matrix is this: the reality generated by your brain and presented to your consciousness. These words, as you are seeing them now, actually exist inside your head.
You could imagine that your nerves were fiber-optic cables and the actual light shining into your eyes flows through them to your consciousness in your brain. If that were true, you would actually see some kind of "real" reality.
But that's not the case. Specialized cells in the back of your eyeball turn the light into a series of neural impulses which then travel through your optic nerve to your visual cortex which begins the process of turning those neural impulses into your vision. Notice I didn't say, "what you see", I said, your vision.
Imagine a 10x10 square of buttons and a television screen. If you push the first button in the first row, a small square appears in the upper-left corner of the tv screen, and if you push the last button in the last row, a small square appears in the lower-right corner. By experimentally pressing buttons you figure out that the buttons are mapped to positions on the screen. By putting small objects to hold them down, you are able to "draw" an image on the screen.
Imagine now that each button represents a light-sensitive cell in your retina and the equivalent of pushing down a button is when light hits one of those cells and causes it to fire an impulse to the brain. Now answer this question: Are you seeing light from your screen right now?
You're seeing the result of a pattern of neural activation.
Look at your hand and ask yourself, "Am I seeing my actual hand?" Again, it's a pattern of activation streaming from your retina to your brain. If you touch the screen you're reading this on, are you touching the actual screen? Nope, it's a pattern of activation from the pressure sensitive nerve endings on your skin.
Here is the ultimate red pill. When you look at your hand, you're not seeing your hand, and it's not entirely the result of a pattern of neural activation. Your brain has to take the sensory information, organize it, identify it, and then present what you experience as your hand to you as "your hand." It's not your hand at all, it's a hand generated by your brain, and presented to you (your consciousness) to be used like the strings of a marionette attached to your "real" flesh and blood hand. When you feel pressure on your hand, the sensation of pressure isn't felt in your flesh and blood skin, it's projected onto the simulation of your hand.
Actually, everything about you and the reality you experience is just a generated simulation of the "real" world. The simulation isn't as accurate nor as complete as most people probably think it is, and there's bugs and rules which can be bent just like in the Matrix from the movie, but I'll get to that in a future post.
One last thought experiment: Imagine that the reality you experience happens inside your brain. As you look around, imagine that behind everything you can see, like an unseen background, is the inside of your own skull. If you can imagine this, you will have a good idea of the relationship between the reality you experience as reality, and the "real" reality.
I would apologize if by realizing what I'm talking about by seeing it first hand drives you batshit insane, but hey, I warned you. If it does, then welcome to the club. :)
If you don't understand this post, reading my previous blog post, It's a funny thing that happens... might help.
Stay Frosty
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