We The People Are Copy Machines, Fairly Good Ones
We Make A Virtual Reality In Our Heads, And Live In It
We spend our lives making copies in our heads of everything we think about, and then essentially we live in these copies.
In the bedrock post of this new newsletter, called THENK, I declared that human thinking is representation. Thinking is making copies of reality, in various degrees of accuracy, with none being perfect.
This is what our brains do, 24x7, other than operate our bodies. Our copy machines never stop, even in sleep, until the time comes when our on/off buttons flip to the final "off" state.
During deep sleep our brains often do turn off the "running self thought" while leaving other thought lines running, and some of these make weird streams of dreams, or not, and sometimes these streams are subsequently reported back, via memory, to the self when the self is turned back on, after sleep.
Evolution didn't have a plan. We human organisms can be so weird, but we also are entirely precious. Life is precious. Rocks can't make copies.
All of human thought and knowledge is representation. From the most inspiring art, to the most complex astrophysics, all that humans think about and accomplish is done via representation, and with the logic inherent in that.
Then the second post in THENK distinguished "thinking itself" from "the objects of thinking", such as the physical universe. This second post described how some of the smartest people, like physicists, including Einstein, apparently conflate these two things when they address the subject of "time".
So then Einstein's greatest work on relativity includes some faulty thinking. He was human after all. For example, apparently he conflated "time that occurs only in thinking" with "flow that happens in the physical universe". If not, then I don't understand what he did with relativity. Fancy that.
Virtual time, which we call time, is completely essential to human existence. We literally could not live without virtual time, that humans invented long ago and then it has been further developed ever since.
Representational thinking creates a virtual reality (VR) in our brains. This VR is essentially comprised of copies of reality, of wildly varying and changing accuracy. This VR essentially is what we are, i.e. cumulative copies that are constantly changing.
Our brains make these representations, i.e. these copies, of everything, of houses, cars, roads, trees, rocks, buildings, on and on. Everything in our lives, including our bodies, is represented in our brains.
These representations that we live in are not the physical reality, per se, but are copies of the physical reality. Therefore we can somewhat accurately say that we live in a virtual reality, a copy reality.
It also is true of course that we as physical bodies do live in the physical reality. We move around in 3 physical dimensions of length, width, and height, among all the objects in our lives, including other people and animals, etc.
So, acknowledged, we also are physical beings living in a physical reality, but the ESSENCE of what we are, our thinking, our copies, is like a virtual reality, the first order virtual reality (FOVR).
From our FOVR we copy the physicality into our FOVR, and we copy everything we think about into our FOVR, including even our internal feelings, emotions, beliefs, hopes, dreams, plans ... everything we experience, both external and internal, is copied into our FOVR.
In summary, then the essence of what we are, and what we live in, is the set of ever accumulating, evolving, changing ... collections of our representations, our copies, of the physical world, of us, of everything that we think about.
Now then, for us to visualize "we the people" as representers and copy machines, this does have important consequences.
For example, later on I will attempt to imagine and possibly formulate methods for searching for "that which is greater" than the advanced ETs, who themselves hypothetically are greater than humanity, ... so these subjects will be explored in THENK later on. Buckle up.
Now for sake of fairness, I will list here some assumed "other views", from people who might disagree with any or all of the above. Yes, there is an outside chance, very remote, that someone somewhere might disagree with something in this post? Like maybe in a Far Side cartoon?
Sincerely though, we do want to appropriately respect all people and their views, even as most of them are wrong. Hah.
Perhaps someone might say "no, I live in the real world and not in some made-up virtual reality. I know what is real and it is everything I see and do and there is nothing virtual about that. So I don't see any need to invent a new label for reality."
Or perhaps someone might say "no, I don't live in my thinking but I live in the real world, the physical world, and my thinking does help me get through life, but I don't live in my thinking. I am more than my thinking."
I think my neighbor's cousin would say "well J. R. this is your standard bullshit that has nothing to do with anything, so why don't you try to do something useful?"
No doubt there can be other views that I cannot even imagine, but in ongoing posts in this THENK newsletter I will try to address all of the main other views that I learn about.
Reader, if you want to see more of my articles in this THENK newsletter, click on my archive page