Simulism

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ezPlq2Z59E

Tomorrow's my birthday. Happy birthday to me, wherever/whatever I am right now!

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLgieQXQnDU

A couple of weeks ago I showed you the Augmented Reality my company created to promote the Legendary Pictures re-launch of the Godzilla franchise "Gojira", which is slated for a 2012 release date. It's been really exciting to see all the positive feedback, including this nice review from Robert Silva, who writes for the New York Times' about.com , and this mention on the popular website "Ain't It Cool News".

Life is But a Dream?
With Legendary Pictures' Inception being such a big hit right now, there's a lot of renewed interest in that age-old existential question: is this all a dream? Is there a way for us wake up from the dream and return to the underlying true reality?

The moment in The Matrix when Neo wakes up in the pod raised these same questions. Likewise, these questions come up in the above video, which is based on my text blog Life is But a Dream, a blog which incorporates ideas compiled into a ten minute YouTube movie called The Quantum Apocalypse.

Simulism
Ever hear of simulism? Check out this link: http://www.simulism.org/Simulation
Simulism.org is a wiki created by the Netherlands' Ivo Jansch, and it brings together a number of interesting bits of information about (to quote from the wiki) "the possibility that our existence rests on an unimaginably complex n-dimensional k-state computer grid with rules governing the transition from one state to another". To which I would respond, my approach to visualizing how "ultimately, the ten spatial dimensions represent an information space from which our observed reality emerges as a tiny subset" is another way of approaching the same idea.

One of the pages at Ivo's thought-provoking wiki lists movies that involve people being embedded within simulations where they may or may not be aware of that fact. One film listed there was a new one to me, if you have 19 minutes check it out, I've posted the video here. Created by David Kaplan and Eric Zimmerman, it's called "Play".


A direct link to the above movie is at http://futurestates.tv/episodes/play

Information Equals Reality
Chapter Four of my book is called "The Binary Viewpoint". Here's a paragraph that relates to all this:

From the binary viewpoint, the tenth dimension becomes like the hugest computer memory in the world, containing every possible “0” and “1” that could be combined together to describe every possible universe. The “holodeck” of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame started out as a “simple” virtual reality simulator, but as the writers developed the series, its power appeared to grow to the point where entire universes could be created within its walls. How would a person’s life inside such a world be different from a life in the real world? The somewhat confusing Matrix Trilogy started out with the same clear and profound concept – our experience inside a system capable of simulating every aspect of reality would, to our senses, be indistinguishable from the experience of actual reality.

Are you and I really living in a vast simulation? What difference would it make if we were or we weren't? Either way, the goal should still be to find ways to enjoy the journey. And if we're not, then why not? Find the problem. Make a change. Make things better.

Rob Bryanton

Next - Time is in the Mind, in FPS