March 8, 2014

Optimization Patch


We are just an optimization patch.   
 That's what the universe is.  That's what we are.  It's a "let's try it like this and see what interesting happens" for totally cosmic rationales that could be simple curiosity, or could be with something interesting. 
Like (and this is a truly terrifying thought, if you really stew over it): Whomever created us may be just as curious about how things will turn out as we are.  Or maybe they've seen it a thousand million times before.  Or maybe some ridiculously broad swath of reality is being modeled in massive parallel, with some way to capture interesting split-off points to yield everything meaningful that could happen.
We can't know their resolution, however.  In other words, when does it fade to nothingness?  It could honestly be just you.  Or just me.  If the simulation is that hyper-local, then it's either you or me -- it couldn't be anybody else, or else you wouldn't be reading this right now.  

Or it could be just the Earth.  Maybe the reason we can't hear life out there is because we're staring off the edge of the simulation -- as ridiculous as me staring in the sky in one of my Dark Souls games and wondering about life out there.  

Or maybe it's the entire Universe.  That's quite possible, too.
On Some Level, All This Is Not Real.
For those of you who are clicking at this and saying, "No, it's not a simulation.  It's real.  This is all real.  I'm real.  You're real." That's ...probably ...mostly true.   But it's DEFINITELY not completely true.

We know on a physics level that reality is rendered.  It's a simulated system -- it figures out how things work only when you need to know and otherwise is more vague.  To be more precise, when we pin down the universe, the tiniest pieces act like particles.  When nobody gives a shit, the universe smears it out in a wave pattern of what's most likely to happen.  It's lazy.
For any physicist readers: I'm not a physicist, even if I have read a considerable amount of physics and general science.  However, if you ARE a physicist, please PLEASE please comment if you think I'm mis-interpreting the Double Slit experiment -- which I've spent more time pondering than any other single thing in my life, full stop.  

But I don't think I am.  And it clearly shows that when we don't give a shit, the universe doesn't give a shit.  That's how it works, at the tiniest levels - and even at progressively bigger levels, although it's tricky to know where it stops, because when we check, then we care, and then the universe calculates it, because it can tell we're looking.

Granted, that's not how physicists typically express the Double Slit experiment, but that's what it's telling us.  At least, I think that's what it's telling us.

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