Some speculative garbage ;)

I was watching this video, and its two children. Stephen Hawking’s Grand Design, The Meaning of Life.

Quite a bombastic title. The documentaries are nice to watch, with flashy editing. Content may appear a bit superficial, though, but they are meant for the large public and not the specialized one. I wrote some comments over at Bakker’s blog.

The summary is that I think it could be possible to see progress and science as the opposite they usually represent. The more science develop, the more we think we have a better grasp on reality. We have more knowledge and disproved ideas such as the sun orbiting around earth. We know physics, we can use electricity, make fancy things and so on. All of this possible because we know better how reality works.

Though you could say that, with this kind of progress, we are emancipating from reality. We concretely live in meaning-full worlds. The internet becomes a good chunk of life. We watch movies, play games. We live into fancy cities with skyscrapers. The environment we actually live in looks nothing like a “natural” world. We still die, suffer of illness and all those things that remind us where the real world is, but there’s still a drift toward a virtual world that is made, opposed to a real world that we are subject to.

The more we achieve progress, the more we purchase virtual land. We take from reality and build anew.

Where does it lead? To a point where reality is completely reclaimed and stops existing. Reality becomes subjective. That threshold may well mean that the notion of “reality” stops to matter. Philosophically you can decide what is true and what is not.

An idea suggested in one of Bakker’s books is that all this could have already happened, in the future. So stretch that same fancy hypothesis. Take the biggest idea like the one about the many worlds, of which the one we know, from the Big Bang to the final collapse is just a grain of sand. What if this impossibly large construct is also man made?

If reality stops existing, then time stops existing. The future collapses into the now. So we have now, a reality that will be built in the future. God, making reality, in this case would be an advanced human being far in the future, who built reality as we see it.

Now think that if reality is completely virtual and man-made, then it means that the actual “real” reality we started from is lost. Men end up living within their imaginary worlds, leaving “real” reality behind. Reality vanishes.

Take the acronym: “GNU’s Not Unix!”. It’s recursive, built by itself. It’s as if the “G” is an original state that is lost and then absorbed into the rest of the body. The same way, virtual reality spawns from “real” reality, but when virtual reality becomes complete, reality disappears. It’s like a “ladder” that you use to reach an high place.

You climb the ladder, then look down. There’s no ladder. It’s like the time paradox where you go back in time to give someone an object so that in the future he’ll give it to you so you can go back in time and give it to him. Strange loops.

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