SNAFU-ED

“Who are we?”

How many times in your life have you heard this question and how bored are you of it? But let’s just try and change a few things about this question. I would rather like to ask you, how are we? Now I’m not looking for any biology or chemistry related answer because I believe we are much more than that. By more, I mean, we’re beings, conscious beings. What makes us conscious? What exactly is consciousness?

It’s basically, our perception and our awareness about everything we see, hear, feel, taste or whatever we know exists. Now think of yourself as just a brain, living inside your body, inside a dark skull. Now our brain is the reason for our existence or the existence of anything we know. But how does our brain know about all of it? Science explains it as senses or impulses. We only come to know that fire is hot when it feels hot when touched or felt from a distance. But how do we know it’s the truth? They are all just guesses from the outside world due to signals. We are all existing due to guesses and when we collectively guess the same thing it becomes a reality. But if, these guesses don’t match we call them hallucinations or something which is not real. Hallucinations are perceived personally and are not actually present or existing. According to us, everything that everyone can see, feel, taste or knows is real, everything else is just imagination inside an individual’s brain, an uncontrolled perception of someone or something.

According to Professor Anil K. Seth, University of Sussex, if hallucinations are uncontrolled perceptions then perceptions are controlled hallucinations. Our brain only senses the right thing because it’s similar to what someone else’s brain sensed. We can also say that all of us are hallucinating right now, at this exact moment. What if everything you see right now is your own hallucination? How would you even know what’s the truth if we’re all hallucinating at the same time? Hence, we live our lives on guesses, presumed notions, and collective perceptions.

Here, comes the argument of simulations. Many respected doctors and scientists believe in the possibility of us living in a simulation. The theory believes that the conscious beings are not the creators, they are rather creations, created by higher beings with such a high level of technology and intelligence that we often associate them with Gods. There are a lot of explanations and evidence which are still missing to prove this theory right.

For a simulation, as vast as our environment, one would require an unimaginable power source, like a supercomputer. But that computer has to be so powerful so as to perform trillions of trillions of trillion operations and actions in one single second. For our level of intelligence, this is nearly impossible. But again, we are not aware of what’s out there.

Then, comes the question of glitches. How many times have we seen strange activities or mysterious things with hardly any explanation? We come across very abnormal scenarios which are sometimes hard to believe or even understand. Glitches are basically, disorders in a continuous algorithm. Just like video games, this world might have glitches. What if our hallucinations are those glitches? We see or perceive something which is not supposed to exist, like an error. The argument of simulation has given birth to many more theories with very less evidence and hence, hard to believe or let’s say not collectively perceived as the same.

But let’s not forget that we are all conscious for our own selves, for what we as an individual perceive or hallucinate. We all have different ways of living, a different way of perceiving things, different consciousness. This is how this world is special and unique to each one of us. So let’s just be glad for this wonderful experience and smoothen the simulation for ourselves and all other conscious beings.

~Apoorv Mathur

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