KindaGamey you might like this idea that reality is a peer-to-peer simulation akin to a game of Halo.
I think this is the perfect functional explanation for any reality that has consciousness as a co-creator in the next moment of reality.
Ooh yes! Especially since all we know and can know is subjective and we are all building our own universes on the inside. (From that 'Beyond the light barrier' book: I THINK THEREFORE I AM
THOUGHT - Descartes corrected.) And in the cases of the paranormal it makes sense that these objects that are larger than our dimension require much more extrapolation and interpretation than objects which are more localized and 'normal'. (e.g. seeing a higher dimensional being as a 60's robot or angel or turnip-man or jesus or buddha or grey alien or owl.)
I haven't read the paper yet (and I might not be capable of fully understanding it? lol I stretch my brain, but I know my limits), but the theory must incorporate the holographic principle as well? (Each piece contains the whole; cut the number of pieces in half and you decrease the 'resolution' of the hologram by half. Not to say that culling humanity would destroy the universe -- every particle is a witness and the protagonist of its own story.)
I've wondered for a while now if the story of God giving us his son as a sacrifice (with the son also being God), is that symbolism for God (the system/whole/consciousness) having to give up omnipotence and omniscience in order to give each particle free will? It's like the ultimate gift. I will "die" from a hierarchical top-down perspective so that you all have the same power of creation as I do and may create from a bottom-up perspective. It is also "dying for your sins" in the perspective that God's death allows you the capacity to sin, or be good, to be one with the whole or set yourself apart, or do whatever. It's your show now. Increase novelty, head-nod to Terence McKenna.
Honestly, something I've been trying to think about to present to you guys is programming related: in direct contrast to the depressing "random robots in a meaningless universe" paradigm that capitalism has been spreading with giddy glee like a malicious spoiler at a Harry Potter convention.
I already mentioned
The Tipping Point in this thread. One of the other things he says is that humans as individuals tend to be pretty wrong. e.g. If I asked everyone here what the average height of a redwood tree is. However, if I mapped all of those answers it makes a shotgun blast around the correct answer, meaning that if humanity put its collective minds together we can come up with right answers. There are other sites out there doing this kind of thing, like one site where some scientists set up a type of game where people can try and create new stable chemical chains or something? Using humanity collectively is like using a quantum computer. I think SETI was using people's individual computers (when idle in screen saver mode) as a type of cloud computer to go through the tremendous amounts of data that they get to try and find an intelligent signal. There are kids on twitch.tv who use a program that collects commands from the chat window and allows huge groups of people to collectively beat a video game like Pokemon.
A.I. is having tremendous problems and doesn't seem to be as smart as we hoped it would be. Humans are also better suited at some functions (e.g. pathfinding) than are the brute force methods of computers. What if we built an intelligence engine where the intelligence was US? If you've ever heard of pseudo-code it is basically instructions in English - hey, we know English! We can follow instructions! We can even re-write our own code!
Pseudocode Example
1.. If student's grade is greater than or equal to 60
Print "passed"
else
Print "failed"
2. Set total to zero
Set grade counter to one
While grade counter is less than or equal to ten
Input the next grade
Add the grade into the total
Set the class average to the total divided by ten
Print the class average.
-- I mean, maybe this is the economy of the future? Instead of people working in meaningless jobs they could not only power the intelligence engine that can replace capitalism and create solutions to problems that we need and want, but we could also continue to re-write and hone the humanOS (operating system) itself and forge the futures we want to see using a system as transparent as possible? Whew!
I always thought it could be like a pay-to-play system. You have to 'do work' for the system and put in some time carrying out instructions in order to be able to play and make requests of the system. (e.g. You 'process' lines in the system by reading 5 or so commands and carrying out a function for each, then in turn you get to ask the great DEEP THOUGHT something like, "should i date jimmy or bob? they both asked me out for saturday and like, jimmy is really hot but mean and bob isn't as good looking but he's really nice." Or something as heavy as, "there are 14 potholes on my street, in order to generate the solution we need 'tarmac', a safety inspector, 12 traffic cones, a truck, and 4-5 workmen..." and the great group mind hashes out the details, gathers the materials, ranks the priorities, and carries out the function in the real world!) It would be like if we had to generate some content before being able to casually view our facebook feeds. Tit for tat. You could also have a 'hidden-hand' where people's judgment could be privately reviewed and good judges in whatever fields could move further and further up the chain. e.g. if Marybeth is an expert on protecting bird habitats all the bird watchers who care and trust her could sacrifice a tiny bit of their own voting power and empower her to be a super-voter with the ability to make decisions for the group who rely on her judgment, but if she went mad with power they could just as easily pull that support away (completely unlike empowering and then being stuck with a senator for two years.) We certainly don't want a tyranny of democracy or forcing everyone to make decisions on minutiae they couldn't care less about. But surely somebody out there cares about that sort of thing, let them handle it! We need to capitalize on the wide swath of talents and interests we all have.
How would it generate enough income to keep functioning? Let that be one of it's first problems to solve. Minimum impact on the number of the user-base, but maximizing survivability of the system.
There's a book called '
Metaphors We Live By' (<- clickable) that has always stuck with me. I find it amazing how in the land of metaphor the differences between physical objects and ideas doesn't exist - everything is equal/fair game.
I have another idea (or is it the same idea?) about mapping meaning. Like, the materialists say that nothing has meaning when the exact opposite is true - everything is BRIMMING with meaning!
Let's say we had a system whereby I could map a location in idea-space... e.g. a tree (contains/is near) bark, leaves, green, brown, nature, etc.
I could group all trees with the concept of forest. I could relate the Marvel movie Age of Ultron with man's fear of technology getting from with us. I could map fear of people becoming brain-dead cell-phone-staring zombies with consumerism and The Walking Dead series. And then someone could take those two larger concepts and group them, both being a fear of the death of individuality, or something like that. And so on and so on up the chain we would go where the most numerous of linked objects would sink to the bottom and the larger and larger concepts would float to the top. Could we find the ultimate meaning? Are there concepts that transcend materials and ideas that are paralleled in physics, in our own minds, in our films, in our religions?
Something about positive and negative, duality, something about repelling and attractive forces? I don't know. I want to build it. I want to know! And I want us to escape from consumerism and capitalism and materialism and not having control over our own futures. We can empower the human organism to re-build itself. We're already moving in that direction if you can step back and see it.
