Quantum Paintings Time Is Space - Chapter 7

“Time is a strange puppy. When humans became conscious, we rose out of the pool of timelessness. There was space, darkness, light, reality and dreaming. There may have even been powerful memories; collective memories that were passed from cell to cell through the eons of time here on Earth where an inner truth exists. It has been built from the very core of existence, a quantum logic that is infused into everything both organic and inorganic."
Rupert Mckenna
"But, has there ever been time? Time, quite possibly, is nothing more than a fiction of our imagination; perhaps the greatest fiction, and it is a fiction which holds our fragile society together. The idea of time and linearity is what drives us forward. It creates the belief that what we do matters…that time is ticking down and that we must hurry..."

-I’m late, I’m late for a very important date-

“…the famous words of Mr. White Rabbit.”

The man, who looked like a cross between John Lennon and the Mad Hatter, held up a bag of dry grey matter.

“These, though, can change all that. These can take us back to a place, in our mind, where the imprisoning concept of time does not exist. These…”

He took the matter from the bag…dry wrinkled grey mushrooms with blue stripes running up their stems.

“…can take you back to the beginning of existence if you care to imagine that…if you dare to pull away the clothes that civilization has wrapped around your perception.”

Albert turned off the video.

"Fucking madman"

Albert spoke into his Grr paw pad, equipped with the latest digital assistant GRRLS (Greatest Reality and Recognition Liaison System). It was the latest virtual assistant from Grog Resin. It was being run on a quantum computing core capable of utilizing quantum tunnelling and vastly speeding up computations. However, there were still problems.

GRRLS DIGITAL ASISTANT
"GRRLS are you following Ha Pi?
"We were talking about you not me."
"No...are you following the man...Ha Pi?"
"Who me?"
"Oh, bloody hell! Nevermind."
Albert Lorenz

Albert put down the pad and moved his eyes to the apish head of Hugo Bones. This was humanity’s final solution? A simple minded formula of beat the other guy mixed together with proteins and enriched vitamins. Is this what mitochondria’s union with prokaryotic cells, which created eukaryotic cells, had amounted to? Evolution, if it had the luxury of choice, wouldn’t…IT COULDN’T have possibly wanted Hugo Bones.

"Albert, who was that guy on the video"
"A person of interest. Has some connection with Ha Pi De Cloun. We will deal with them later."

Albert picked up the Grr paw pad. Stupid thing has to work at some point.

“GRRLS, what is the simulation hypothesis?”
“Okay, here is what I found on the web for ‘What is simulation?’”

GRRLS displayed various websites relating to simulation.

“No…What is the simulation hypothesis?”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Fucking GRRLS” muttered Albert.
“I’m not sure what you said there, Albert.”
“SIM-U-LA-TION HY-PO-THE-SIS” Albert said, clearly and slowly.

GRRLS displayed a series of links to webpages about The Simulation Hypothesis.

Albert opened the Wiki page about The Simulation Hypothesis and showed it to Hugo.

“Do you know what this is, Hugo?”

Hugo read the title. There was a pause large enough to park a nuclear aircraft carrier.

Hugo Bones Ponders
“Uhh...No”
“Well, it is an argument that basically states that there are three basic results for technologically advanced civilization such as ours:"
"1) They go extinct before developing conscious intelligent simulations, or what we shall call ancestry simulations."
"2) They lose interest in developing these types of ancestor simulations and never make them."
"3) They develop these ancestor simulations which probability math would then suggest that we are most likely living in.”

Now, Hugo is as intelligent as the next human, but he suffers, as we all do, from schemas that develop motivated reasoning. In short, it means you hear only what fits your design of the world. You only hear what positively reinforces your understanding. Hugo listened to the words coming from Albert’s mouth, but he only really heard:

“advanced technology and simulations”.
Hugo Bones Ponders
“Like virtual reality games?”

Hugo had played these and particularly liked the ones with guns and sex.

“No, Hugo. These simulations are far more complex. They are so real that the characters built by the programmers within the programs don’t know that they are in a simulation”

Hugo was having problems processing this idea. How could a character in a game know anything other than when to die?

“You mean that the zombies, politicians and bad guys I shoot in the games would feel the pain?”

Hugo, particularly liked the idea that politicians would feel pain.

Albert Lorenz Pontificates
“It is more than that Hugo. Everything inside the program is designed to be so real that it would all feel as you feel the world now. You would remember your mother, father, brothers and sisters - hence, the name ancestor simulation. You would remember going to school, your girlfriends, getting married, having children and growing old. You would read news about other countries, other people and look into the night sky; all which has been designed by a computer program. You wouldn’t realize that everything in your world, your life, your reality was simulated. Essentially, you would be alive.”
“If you are alive, how can you be simulated?”
“You are, essentially, alive…you are virtual life. Everything is as if you are alive, but you aren’t…well, there is still much debate out there regarding that aspect”
Hugo Bones Ponders

Hugo couldn’t rap his mind around the “everything, but you aren’t” part. Well, truth be told, neither can I, but I just pretend…that is what supposedly intelligent people do… a great deal of pretending … as if we know. Like trained professionals when, in fact, we are really just trained. Highly trained, mind you, but merely sycophants salivating at the mere sight of power and money, kind of like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. You get better gigs this way.

Oh, yes, I have broken the rule again. I would say that I am sorry, but I just don’t care, you see. It isn’t that I’m impolite. Well, I am - a fucking rude, uncultivated snob, who thinks everyone is ignorant. Yes, I pretend to be polite: I say please and thank you, I hold the door open and try to help people when I can, but that is because of training. It all comes down to training. We are, really, just like dogs in that way. Without training, we are just temple rats scuttling about any dime store cult sucking the excrement pouring out from its sluice gates. I was trained well by my parents. They taught me to be this way and I couldn’t change if I tried, and, truth be told, I thank them for it. It makes it easier to live in society if you are pleasant enough.

But, when I dig down deep, I’m a cold motherfucker who would let you rot in the gutter like road kill and it wouldn’t cause more than a five minute period of slight unease. I might have trouble getting to sleep that night. It would be that unease one gets from an unpleasant sight - death can be unsettling - but none of it would be feeling. I blame it on the objective eye. I have come to understand that we are cold inorganic elements in a very complicated process of chemical flux and reactions following the rules of physics…nothing more and nothing less. Oh, it is beautiful and bordering on pure fucking magic, but in the end, simple particles acting as waves in a dance of quantum entanglement which can mystify the eye of the beholder - me included.

However, I digress. Let’s get back to Hugo and the story.

“Look, Albert. You are either alive or not alive…right?”
“The concept of what is life and what is death…well, it is not as clear cut as you might think. After all, we defined life. It wasn’t as if God handed us a manual detailing all the particulars of the universe. We are just making it up as we go along. So, when I say that you are virtually alive, it might actually mean that you are really alive. Reality is in the eye of the beholder.”

Hugo’s mind wasn’t built for this sort of…well, let’s just call it what it is … “Fucking Bullshit”. He had always lived in a very black and white world. To him, things were simple, binary. Everything is or it isn’t. You are born as a boy or a girl. You like killing things or you’re reading poetry like a pussy. You are dead or you are alive…there just wasn’t any room for grey areas. Hugo had a great dislike for things that didn’t fit into their respective holes. He preferred simple puzzles with straightforward answers, not haiku answers to Kung Fu questions.

“Reality is reality, Albert. We aren’t in a simulation and we aren’t going extinct. So, this simulation hypothesis is just…wrong!”
Albert Lorenz's God Complex
“Hugo, we are in stage one of this argument. We are about to move into stage two. However, we are not going to stop there. Soon, with the help of Chester Field, Harvey Kalapski and our RV experiment, we are going to have the computing power and that extra element which will allow us to begin to move into stage 3”
“But…that is the stage where you are in a simulation? How can that be?”
“No, Hugo. We will be the ones making the simulations. We will have achieved the ultimate goal of complex life. We won’t just be able to design humans, we will be able to design life and the universe that holds it. We will have become God!”
Created By
scott tate
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