From a Ray Kurzweilian perspective, most of humanity will exist in an artificially simulated world after the technological singularity. “Are we living in a simulation?” is a frequently asked question on Elon’s many rogue stage appearances. The movie The Matrix took this idea mainstream, and futurists since have been debating the possibility of simulated realities and their psychological repercussions on the individual and the collective. A simpler simulation can be the digital reality that we subscribe to through our Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat feeds. Prolonged exposure to these social media accounts, views, lenses, changes our view of how things really are. Isolated in our physical and digital bubbles, our minds construct a blurred version of a reality because actual reality is far too complex for us to understand.
When media was controlled by a handful of cable giants, we plugged into a monoculture whenever we sat in front of our television sets. There was no on-demand entertainment. We accepted the scheduled programing coming through the broadcasting stations—timing our dinner and bathroom breaks around our preordained favorite shows. Companies and governments dictated how the average Joe saw and understood the world, who were the good and bad guys, and what he was allowed to see and believe. After Netflix (and subscription streaming) disrupted the entertainment industry, we became overloaded with variety, which split us into clusters that follow different genres and shows. This segmented the old entertainment monoculture and branched pop-culture into further distinctions; with their own catch phrases, memes and inside jokes. The increase in choice availability has resulted in fractured relatability and entertainment prerequisites when trying to have a casual conversation. When spectators are immersed in Westworld’s storyline, they lose track of which reality the protagonists are in. This Inception perception effect is found in many engaging stories and modern shows. This wraps the watcher in an interwoven fabric of storylines that mesh timelines—by flashbacks and flashforwards—to lose the viewer in the drama. Successful movies, shows and video games are the ones that can trigger the laboratory of human emotions by simulating different realities. Through digital entertainment, the multifaceted highs and lows of internal human experience are getting more and more condensed into twenty minute, one hour or two hour time frames.
Internet access, camera enabled mobile devices and basic editing skills, have enabled everyone to curate and broadcast any reality they want to project. And today, broadcasted reality choices are far more numerous than any moment in history. Everyone has a voice and can add to the net of online digital media instantaneously. This has created an internet where everything, everywhere is happening all at once across all platforms, keeping us in a loop of application switching. It’s better to always get the whole perspective before deciding where you stand on an issue but what if all you are receiving is noise? Oversubscribing makes our feeds and inboxes cluttered with clashing ideologies and opinions. People that know how to cut through the noise and digital overstimulation are the most clear minded of us. It’s with them that we should cross reference our maps and mental models of the digital and physical world.
Outside the blackmirror of our LCD screens, simulated realities also exist, and have existed for much longer than technologically induced realities. We have all been invited to a social gathering at a friend’s place, and as host, they over express their taste in music or a political opinion. Being the polite guests that they are, the conformist populous don’t put up much resistance to challenge the reality of their host. This pattern can be seen in workspaces, dewaniyas, and other gatherings, where we expect to see the same people again and again. Slowly an order occurs in which the loudest or the one with most power exercises their ideology on the others, eventually winning blind supporters. Out of this a version of culture emerges, sharing specified food, playing the same games, exchanging safe topic conversations, etc. The culture content changes as the more tolerant and open minded take control, pushing the group towards a different reality. An influential person can create new realities if they deliver a strong message that seeds the minds of the listeners. When those seeds dig roots and grow, minds change and adapt to a new version of the simulated world of selected ideas and projections. A healthy community has members that disagree openly, engage in lively discussions, say I don’t know, and reserve an opinion until further investigation. If groups silence or crush opposition, no growth or opening of hearts and minds can occur. If we don’t have open societies, we just graze around in big monoculture control cults. Functional groups that allow open dialogue have a built-in safeguard against degenerate thinking. If your reality is being influenced and controlled by someone else, is it really your reality?
In today’s fast-paced—efficient—economies, our brains tune out in order to survive external highs and lows. Being professional means boxing your natural state of mind in the workplace, until you can go home and binge watch organized pixels that give you the thrilling dopamine and adrenaline fix that you have been mentally backlogging. During what little sleep we get after our screen eyeballing sessions, our brains process the events and emotions of both actual and artificial realities—in some cases mixing around or merging the two. Then we wake up and do the back and forth, simulation and reality jumping all over again. This back and forth switching can be mirrored in emotional jumping, when friends or acquaintances pull us back to a forgotten memory or a future plan, forcing our minds to visualize situations out of the present moment. This tunes our minds out of what is actually occurring right here, right now.
Our eyes are the gateway to a lot of what’s happening in our physical and digital landscape. What we see with our eyes feeds our mind and gives us a sense of where we stand in our version of the world. Because we can take in sensory information, process it, and act on it, we are considered by some definitions as conscious. But what is the consciousness that has been looking from behind our eyes, and when does it become self-aware, expansive and enlightened? Do certain types of conversations and content diminish our awareness while other types expand and broaden us? Are you controlling your own consciousness fuse box or have you given away the key?
Einstein was famous for his special relativity train thought experiment, in which he breaks down how time is subjective to the observer. Scientists since, have come up with novel ways to measure spacetime. In this moment in human history, we lack the knowledge to physically travel to the star systems our space telescopes capture with long exposure. But do we always have to physically move to travel through space? Where does psychological space exist? Where does our perspective go when we change our mindset?
“Few cross the river of time and are able to reach non-being. Most of them run up and down only on this side of the river. But those who when they know the law follow the path of the law, they shall reach the other shore and go beyond the realm of death.” —Horace
I’m proposing we take the traveling experience out of spacetime and into psychtime. To me, psychtime has three variables: 1. speed at which the mind travels 2. direction 3. depth.
- Like computers, different minds have different speeds, and different modes of thinking. If we run today’s graphics intensive applications on a 1998 iMac it would stutter and crash under the mental processing demands of todays digital world. In some respects people are similar, especially in todays fast moving culture and evolving languages. The speed in which a person understands, thinks and responds differs from language to location to interest to passion…
