Off-Base in An Unreal Reality

The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIU Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics Agree We Are in a Video Game, by Rizwan Virk. Bayview Books, 2019.

A two-letter word recurs time and again in Rizwan Virk’s book The Simulation Hypothesis. It is the structure upon which his elaborate edifice involving game design, quantum physics, and the philosophy of consciousness is built. It makes possible great leaps of the unfettered imagination. It defies logic while conjuring up the leading edge of science. And that word is “if.”

IF quantum theory can be explained by the presence of an infinite number of alternate universes…IF human perception can be authentically simulated in an artificial consciousness…IF technology can advance fast enough for this amazing vision to be realized while humans still inhabit the planet…then just possibly that layer cake of IFs will actually get baked!

To invoke the name of Philip K. Dick, as the author frequently does, is to tackle the vexed problem of authenticating reality. Just as Dick’s characters find themselves questioning the reality of reality itself, Virk takes seriously the idea that we may be living in a made-up phenomenal simulation similar to the virtual realities in the games he himself designs.

Let’s say that all the layers of IF are true. The probabilities argue that there is a better than infinitesimal chance that the world is a simulation. It may not prove to be a big videogame in the sky, it may be something like nothing we ever dreamed of. There’s a chance that there is a master artificer intelligence operating somewhere in the multiverse. In that scenario, huge branches get created exponentially in the cosmic tree of possibilities as simulations beget new simulations. So the probabilities are excellent that we are one of those simulations and not really living at all in “base reality.”

Along the way as you read The Simulation Hypothesis you’re going to learn a lot about the history of videogame development, the frontiers of the physics of spacetime, and why UFOs and near-death experiences and angels reinforce the hypothetical uber-reality we all may inhabit.

All his is delivered by Rizwan Virk in a clear, readable style that is one of the best expositions of this kind of quantum-speak I’ve seen. I’ve read countless explanations of Schrodinger’s Cat and the Dual Slit Experiment in other books. You might have too, and are tired of hearing about them. There is a point to revisiting them to entertain this simulation hypothesis. However, it’s not that the paradoxes of time travel and quantum superposition are going to finally make sense. That’s not what we’re about here. We’re in the grip of a brilliant thought experiment. Nothing is proven and nothing is rejected. Let’s move on.

This book is not just a mind blower, it is a mind tornado. It forces you to take seriously the unreality of reality. It plunges you into the wildest dreams suggested by science fiction and the most extreme speculations of quantum physics. You pick up this book, check your skepticism at the door. You’re going to travel on Spaceship Einstein with a stopover in the mystic East as you plunge into the videogame that is your life. Happy landings!

Deep structure of time

If we regard time linguistically as a network of semantic moments, a labyrinth that is fundamental to yet independent of chronological superstructuring, we enter a training ground in which we are invited, like children, to devise our own grammar before anybody attempts to teach it to us. In encountering an event, we are stopped like glottal resistance points in a speech performance. These resistances must be digested, the deep structure meaning absorbed like a cough drop in the mouth. Eventually a rhythm emerges from the irregular swoops of hovering intelligence. Spherical music unfolds from the luminous arcs that describe the landscape of event structures. It is a feast of total comprehension, as we sink our temporal lobes into the momentous essence, tunneling through the data-rich loam of depth understanding.

Before the dawn

Seeing two new movies The Post and Darkest Hour on consecutive nights, one is struck that both these retellings of decisive historical moments in 1971 and 1940 have a lot in common. The former is about the publication of The Pentagon Papers in The Washington Post, revealing government lies about the Vietnam War over several administrations;Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as Katharine Graham are at the top of their game, as is director Steven Spielberg. The latter film is about Churchill's refusal to knuckle under to Hitler around the time of Dunkirk, despite political pressure to make peace. Gary Oldman superbly evokes the inspiring oratory and fallible human depth of the revered Prime Minister. Both decision situations required unflinching courage in the face of considerable opposition.

Both films by implication may be read as commentaries on the present political situation in the United States. It is the absence of the principled leadership portrayed in Darkest Hour that one feels keenly now. In fact, the war we are in at present not being fought on the beaches but in the cyber-impulses that are flooding our air space. And the matter of "who is the enemy?" is looking very much like our own commander-in-chief. The characteristics of a great leader may be very much the same as they ever were. The lesson here is in what we have lost.

The Post may be seen as "Hollywood Strikes Back" against the attack on news media and the First Amendment by the present administration. I think we have here an instant classic which may have been designed to be so, and may echo typical liberal ideas, but is nonetheless effective for that. What is plainly delivered here by the artists' representatives in our society is that this shall not stand, that the ideal of free speech is what this country is all about, and that lying by governments will not be tolerated.

It is never that simple, of course. The media have often been used to control and misinform the public. Whether more often than not is a matter of debate. Let us see these two films as a history lesson, so as not to forget the moments when leaders had actual integrity and courage, and news media were not afraid to speak the truth. If it happened before, it can happen again. And in fact right now it is happening again, daily in the pages of the Post, many years after their 1970's moments of glory. Attention must be paid: the Fourth Estate is stepping up to the plate.

Place holder

This blog post is actually a place holder, as I do not want to let 2017 go by without having registered new proof of my existence. I started this blog in 2004 with 128 posts. In 2015 I blogged once and once again in 2016. In 2017 it was almost nonce, until now. To tweet is human, to blog divine.

Why this downward trend, this trailing away into nothingness? Am I becoming inarticulate? Should I be talking about the brilliance of Twin Peaks or Doctor Who (trying to preempt generations of commentators)? Should I be detecting the influence of Van Gogh's style on Shakespeare (because I believe these things work backwards in time)? Should I spout off more of my deranged metaphysics such as what I wrote in 2005?

I probably should say, write, and do a lot of things I don't. Perhaps in 2018 I will be more successful at the Problem of the Unwritten Blog if I just grasp for transient moments of insight or inspiration rather than codify eternal pronouncements of infinitude. Perhaps that will be my New Year's resolution, to do just that. Prepare to be surprised. Or not.

Wonder where you can get it

I discovered some brief comments I wrote after seeing the much maligned Jupiter Ascending in the theater last year. Even now I see that Rotten Tomatoes gives it only a 26%, which to me is positive proof that critics who are not versed in the history of the various genres of science fiction really are not to be trusted when it comes to reviewing sf films. Not to lose track of my comments, here they are:

"The epic science-fiction movie Jupiter Ascending has not made it unscathed through the critics' gauntlet; it wears a giant red spot as its badge of honor. Directed by the Wachowski brothers, who created The Matrix and Cloud Atlas, this new film has been widely greeted as a bull to the reviewers' swords, who have themselves contributed a fair amount of raging bull to the discussion. Most of the critics begin with the tedious assertion that this movie is a rip-off of Star Wars and its innumerable clones. Although its roots in pulp fiction are usually mentioned, I wonder how many have actually read pulp fiction as it was practiced in the 1930s and 40s, or are familiar with the quality fantasy artwork from that period. How many have experienced the vaunted "sense of wonder" which was the genre's original raison d'etre? This film is not some smart-alecky pastiche of this artistic and literary form. It evokes the original spirit of the genre like no other film. Nor can the superlative art and special effects of Jupiter Ascending be divorced from its content. As in The Matrix, in Jupiter Ascending mankind is being harvested for its life-essence, but rather than by scary machines, this time it is by immortal humans living in a parallel dimension on a world that looks exactly like the planet Jupiter."

Much more could be said. In the meantime I would refer you to the Blu-Ray and to this excellent review.

Message on the matter

Half a league half a league half a league inward
Down in the valley the valley so hindered
Grew the tree downward inside the hear ring
To know the green glorifold six hundred things.

Immanent indolent full tide of May
Try to deliver the present with sleigh
Summer no snow puts man on the skids
Aggrieved to store nuttings in jars without lids.

Tried on for size the great gown does not fit
Only can fashion itself to be knit
Into the fabric of all space and time
Including what seems to be rightfully mine.

Stringless pluckers and songs without voice
A bad combination yet what is the choice
Is it better to buy what you still do not have
Or spot a bright copper on the road to the path?

My hand finds the handle the coin springs to touch
I discharge it to you though it doesn’t mean much
But maybe some child will one day depend
In the meantime this child says hello to the end.

Half a league half a league half a league Tuesday
The story’s half told and it isn’t yet bluesday
If I’m not here tomorrow don’t go looking for maps
It’s a long road till one day and a short time perhaps.

Adventure in identity

The iconic actress Monica Vitti in L'Avventura.

One of the movies that invariably finds its way onto my list of all-time favorite films is Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960). Very little seems to happen in this film: a party of the idle rich take a day's jaunt to a small rocky island where one of their party, Anna, mysteriously disappears. Her lover Sandro and her best friend Claudia continue to search for her in the towns of the area for several days, during which they too become lovers. Very quickly he is unfaithful to her, but she forgives him. End of picture (running time: 2:25).

This precis does no justice of course to what the movie is really about. Which is? Well, if you are interested in Antonioni's amazing cinematic style, style is substance and the artist's way of selecting images and placing the actors in interesting natural and architectural spaces is the end in itself. If you are more inclined to want to find a "meaning," then the existential philosophy of Antonioni and the European intellectuals of the time is a natural connection. The film simply underlines the futility of modern life through the shallow, sex-obsessed ways of the bored upper class, and the endless repetition of profane experience that gives no surcease for the soul.

My version of what existentialism should be is discovering the intrusion of pure existence into the landscape of what we call the real but is not in fact real at all, only appearance. L'Avventura is a film burgeoning with pure existence. It is fraught with the trembling ecstatic edge of possibility, replete with the meaning that passes understanding.

The opening catlike theme of the movie is a fantastic dance that announces that we are about to witness nothing less than a mystery story of the most intriguing kind. And that is exactly what we get: like many of Antonioni's films, L'Avventura is a mystery. The question is what happened to Anna? Did she drown? Did she slip away from the island somehow and completely leave her life behind? After all investigations and speculations, it comes down to this: we don't know. We will never know. The filmmaker has posed to us a conundrum and refused to give us the answer, after creating expectations that we had every right to expect should be fulfilled. But of course, what kind of conventional satisfaction are you going to get from an existential mystery, where every question is an open question, and the answers stay at last in the locked rooms that they inhabit?

The real mystery here is not what happened to Anna but what happens to Claudia. As she searches for her lost friend, she takes on Anna's identity. The first sign of this is that after getting drenched in a storm, she puts on a dry shirt belonging to Anna. Then she appropriates Sandro, Anna's boyfriend, taking her friend's place in that relationship and showing the same ambivalence about him that Anna did. Towards the end of the film, she has the fear that Anna has returned but she finds Sandro in the arms of a trollop instead. By accepting him as he is in the end, her quest comes to an end by finding the object (Anna) as herself (Claudia).

Against the primal pure existent background of the sea, the wind, the rocky island, the deserted towns, the silent architectural edifices, the characters shuffle between odd encounters with each other and minor disappearances which seem to emphasize the randomness and fragility of the patched-together reality in which they live.

The ultimate mystery here is the film itself, how it exists, somewhat miraculously, like a monolithic gnomon amidst the wanderings of bewildered humans.

Still turning pages

We are constantly learning and perfecting ourselves, even if we don't realize it at the time. The idea of Earth as a school in which we go through some purifying experiences that move us closer to total enlightenment is, unfortunately, probably correct. I say "unfortunately" because although the analogy explains a lot, it doesn't really comfort. And it leaves the individual learner ultimately alone on a lonely track.

So maybe the whole thing is a team project. Those of us who find ourselves here must find ways to learn together, solve our mutual problems, and achieve communal goals of knowledge and action that could not be accomplished without group interaction. This also solves the loneliness issue.

Looking at the Earth right now, it would be hard to argue that the whole class has not flunked all together. The polarities and intransigencies have hardened as if the global brain had massively shifted obliquely in its techtonic plates. The axis of communication and understanding is askew and drifting hopelessly off its center of gravity and cohesion. Is this the supreme challenge, or simply the endgame?

My generation, the 1960s, I often refer to as "the most disappointing generation." So much potential was wasted, squelched, drowned in materialistic cares, forgotten by the wayside. Yet there was so much that was brilliant and brave and illuminating. As a result we have left a huge legacy.

To give up hope, to say the game is over, would be premature. It also deprives us of our best tool. Give up the vision and we have nowhere to go. It also ignores the fact that a new generation is arriving with better tools and higher intelligence. We could fail completely and yet the team reserves could still pull off a victory.

But what we have done, what we have witnessed, what we have felt--it hasn't been enough to justify our presence here on this planet at this time in our individual and collective evolution. That is why we find ourselves still here, waiting, struggling, hoping, still turning the pages of our textbook. There is more. What happens next remains to be seen.

Our cosmic address

In James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), young Stephen Dedalus writes his address in his geography book: Sallins, County Kildare, Ireland, Europe, The World, The Universe. In Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1938), a minister sends a letter to one of the characters, with the following address: Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America; North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God. An echo of Joyce's influence over Wilder and also a resonance elevating the mundane to the cosmic.

Nowadays we would have to include Laniakea in the address: the newly named and mapped supercluster consisting of 100,000 galaxies, of which the Milky Way, our home galaxy, is a very small part. And since many cosmologists are seriously favoring the idea that we live in a multiverse, not merely a universe, we would have to tack the "multi" at the end of the address.
But in any case this addressing very much follows the geocentric plan, starting small and local, progressing to the largest and most universal. "I" is the center, moving out beyond all boundaries and objectivity into pure idea. A mind blowing concept, yes, but a little too simplistic, perhaps. For we must next ask the question, what after all is the spacetime matrix in which all this expanding pool of consciousness sits?

Let us dispense immediately with the notion that we are still in the realm of material creation in addressing this question. We've entered the realm where consciousness itself has to be part of the equation. And consciousness times x equals consciousness, just as an odd number added to an even equals an odd, or a real number times an imaginary number equals an imaginary number.

In conventional physics, space and time do not exist without matter. They are dimensional only in the sense that they are used to measure the material. In this multiversal age we may take the step into multidimensionality and recognize the independent existence of time and space. It is these entities which, together with consciousness, weave the matrix. Then consciousness takes its place like a baby in the "cradle endlessly rocking," lying in the central heart of immeasurable existence. Cosmic address: wherever IT is.

Signal

manifold stars clot the headless sky
drive in the desert till you can't even try
to indulge pursuit of the eternal why
or the reason of what it's concerning

mute punctuations on the walls of space
poems in the raw that the winds may trace
written by the voice with the human face
and the suns of the suns keep on burning

then come echoes from the steely night
lacking the resistance of a fiery bite
just a little early and a little uptight
for the stars are too slow in their turning

deeper and deeper into the maze
some may flicker in and out of phase
some may fade away and some may gaze
and the others are condemned to be yearning

colored curtains and candles with flame
who has the time to remember their name
what's been forgotten is too soon regained
in the cauldron the goddesses are churning

unlikely visions replaced by dream
you never can hold on to what they mean
they sometimes whisper and they sometimes scream
but they all are just a part of what you're learning

sing to the rhythm and  dance the sound
light is the signal in the underground
you're lost on the highway so far from town
no one knows when you'll be returning

Seed

you wrote a poem today
I didn't
therefore your poem
is better than my poem

and yet since my poem
doesn't exist
who is to say
it will not be better
in some impossible future
where I am a great poet

but no one
will write encomiums
to unplanted flowers
or unconceived realities
ripeness is all
the fruit begets itself
the seed that stays a seed
is no seed at all

what unseen caravans trample the air
beneath my eyes
the same that rattle my undreamt brains
in the early morning hours

where nobody cares
about merit

Through the rithm

neutrino technology is actuarial and non-binding / limitless
closest thing to infinity programming as you can get

electrons aggregate / except with polarization which leads to digital reductionism
synodrope / a statistical pudding / one whole taste, not individual elements anymore
a heuristical layer cake of high functioning algorithms under one system of control

digital technology has limited adaptive functioning
heuristic program is self-managing
synodropic function is what we're cognizing

(notes from a conversation with Janet Sussman)

Fielder's choice

I have a very tentative and preliminary comment about the theories linking zero point energy field (ZPF) to quantum physics (as in the works of Lynne McTaggart and Erwin Laszlo). It seems reductive to talk about "The Field" as being ultimate Oneness. In mathematics, the concept of infinity exists but there can be multiple infinities, different types of infinity. Similarly, "the Field" could simply mean a type of field rather than an ultimate Oneness in and of itself: a unified field, not the unified field. In all the theorizing by "New Age" writers and physicists, we have not gotten to the point where consciousness is ontologically linked to the physical world. Consciousness may be seen by McTaggart and others as an intentional agent that affects physical reality, but I do not think we have a "real" physical phenomenon at all until consciousness witnesses it. In this interactivity of subject, object, and epistemological process, creation unfolds out of itself which includes the containment field of the space-time matrix that hosts the "matter." The constituents of creation mechanics thus include the consciousness principle, but the oneness of consciousness itself cannot necessarily be postulated as a priori. Like the quantum particle, its existence is contingent on a complex acausal interaction that simultaneously brings physical reality into being, observes it, completely inhabits it, and finally becomes it. However, when I say "consciousness itself" I do not contradict the multiplicity of consciousnesses which recreate the universe in each of their separate dimensional existences. As in samkhya philosophy, the monads of consciousness, the purusas, are points of individual cosmic existence, each of them self-existent onenesses that do not cross-reference.
Ultimately a more advanced theory of time is needed to unravel the spectrum of Oneness Fields. McTaggart posits "everything in the future already exists at some bottom-rung level in the realm of pure potential, and that in seeing into the future, or the past, we are helping to shape it and bring it into being, just as we do with a quantum entity in the present with the act of observation" (Lynne McTaggart, The Field, p. 173). This viewpoint, as advanced as it may seem, privileges present time unnecessarily. In considering time's trajectory from past to future to be an advancement from more concrete (historical) to more abstract (uncertain and probabilistic), the present becomes simply a moving point along that line. I think we are dealing more with a staging platform which can accommodate all the known temporal states (past, present, and future manifesting something like solid, liquid, and gas) simultaneously through the lens of multiple consciousnesses, existing simultaneously in parallel universes, and ultimately resolving, if at all, in a multiverse that can support completely contradictory laws of nature. Recent research in cosmology may be pushing us in the direction of resolving quantum theory not as a unified field but as a vast warehouse of scrolled fields, each speaking its own language and each contained in its individual jug.

When it changed

Something happened this week while people were distracted by the Presidential election. It had to do with the election, but it was really about what was happening down in the foundations of the structure.

Something was changing. Minds were changing. Hearts were changing. Time itself was changing.

Remember in Ray Bradbury's story "A Sound of Thunder," where the traveler back in prehistoric times accidentally steps on a butterfly and thus when he comes back to the present everything has just gone terribly wrong. A fascist is elected president, when in the reality that the traveler left, that wasn't going to happen.

In 2000 AD, time went off the rails. A fascist was elected president through a succession of dirty tricks, and a host of bad things happened that wouldn't have if the popular choice had won: 9/11. The Iraq War. The banking collapse and stock market crash.

None of that was in the original plan. Who stomped the butterfly that caused the wrong path to be taken?

Then this week, we witnessed a miracle. The train of time that had jumped the rails, gone unaccountably wrong, somehow jumped back on! It took an act of collective consciousness and will, one that it seemed impossible could happen. And yet the impossible did happen, so things changed again. Away from the hell scenario that we were being ushered into by the smiling pink-skinned people who adorned themselves in flag colors.

I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that the impulse threatening us has been murderous in nature. Mostly they are content to poison our food, poison our minds, and bleed us dry. But in their dreams I think they would love to just randomly, casually, shoot us down and pile up the bodies.

What intense relief I feel. Not that it's over; it's never over. This battle is in the cards as long as there are atoms in the universe. But at least the man doesn't have his thumb on the scales any longer. How long has it been in the history of this planet since time got redeemed? Well, I think it just happened again.

The shape of quarks to come

NOTE: The following information has been superseded by itself, as scientific knowledge is by definition subject to constant revision. Thus anything that is said henceforth may be regarded as an illustration of quantum foam, in that the breakdown in structure it implies is embedded in the very structure of what is being said at the moment. This inherent self-referentiality and paradoxicality thereby temporarily converts qubikuity into a postmodern blog, for better or worse.
Someone mentioned quantum foam the other day as a pleasant-sounding thing, and I agreed that if you ordered a cosmic cappucino, you would definitely want it with lots of quantum foam.
Quantum foam refers to the miniscule scale where physical reality breaks down from the level of solid objects into complete immateriality. This is said to be at the incredibly tiny Planck length, or 10(-37) cm. The smallest bit of matter we know of is the quark. Now, I have been googling around to find out what a quark looks like. My guess is that it is not round like a tiny billiard ball. Anything that is on the verge of being dissolved into quantum foam is unlikely to be so regularly shaped. Furthermore, they are unlikely to be hard like billiard balls as well. My guess is that they have a spongy surface, rather like green cheese as in the case of the surface of the moon.
Of the six types of quarks (up, down, top, bottom, charm, and strange), the smallest is the up quark. The up quark is also known as a first-generation quark. By comparison, the bottom quark is quite large, but then it pops in and out of existence for only a micro-instant. Evidently, on that level, size doesn't really "matter."
For your edification I have found a picture of a bottom quark, again by googling. This is as accurate as present-day science can render it.

The rope

a skinny rope

hanging in space
attached to nothing

supports the weight of moons
heavy planets
eclipses
and sorrow

all air lifts
feet dancing up the aerial path
mind takes wing and
who can gainsay this
light quintessence

the rope could

pull it down and the curtain opens

The way it is

We are in thrall, no doubt, to unseen forces which may be human, alien, or a combination thereof. Their existence behind the scenes, pulling the strings, determining our lives in ways great and small, is well documented. Most people now accept the fact of a secret conspiracy that has existed for centuries and has led to control by a few of the world's riches. What gives them this degree of domination over people's lives? Their ability to control people's minds.

The project of dumbing down humanity, endemic in history for generations, has been going especially well of late. The PTB (Powers That Be) have discovered how to subvert our belief systems so that whenever we act in what we conceive to be our own interest, we are in fact doing the bidding of the impersonal power elite whom we unwittingly serve. Our accustomed basis of ethics and rationality lies in we believe about ourselves. We see ourselves as good. Our unconscious sees us as evil as a corrective and so they are at war with each other. Both are deluded.

This inner war that is fought every second in every cell in the body between the anti-entropic forces of life and the free radical forces of death finds its reflection in human conflicts and in the works of the imagination, which depend upon standards of opposition. The binary split which creates such dynamics of evolution and change in biological systems and cultural histories is terrifying and forces our minds into paralysis. It is as if we deny the reality of struggle all about us, in favor of the negligent peace of a separated mental stance. This fact is food for the PTB. It enables them to feed us on images of warring divinities, driving us to distraction, while their banquet tables are laden with the spoils of our feverish labors.

Now that I have spilled the beans, so to speak, about the aforementioned (Trigrammaton), your belief system may never be the same again. For that destructive act I may be labelled a terrorist, but hopefully not yet a martyr. To avoid that fate I must go underground, to Pellucidar. You will receive my next dispatch from an overheated room somewhere in the back of my imagination.

Waking

the sleeper wakes
into a dream
and from there wakes
into a series of dreams
where waking is but a vision of light

morning is broken
the shards of the day fall back
into the theatre of night
where plays are endlessly enacted
and the stage is but a stage
for future performances

stop counting time
play the music to its own beat
you will yet be able to take your exit
when the early dawn
wraps itself around your feet

Puzzling the will

The will to live. It's a good thing, so we think. In fact, isn't there a judgment about people who do not have much of a will to live? I'm not just talking about people who are driven to suicide, but those who live carelessly and let themselves lapse into ill health, or who simply underutilize their resources and live less fully than perhaps they ought? It speaks to our own will to live, somehow offending the norm of the entire human community in which we find ourselves. We are all here equally under the circumscription of the body and the senses, and "the heart-ache and the thousand shocks that flesh is heir to." And we all have to daily exercise that will muscle in order to have the determination to stick with it. You can't get out of it that easily, we say to our less willful brethren. Suck it up already!

But the question I would pose is: whose will is it really? Who wants us to live? Is it even ourselves? How do we know some alien race has not bred us to inhabit this planet, and somehow needs our life force to exercise itself for a certain number of years in order to benefit them energetically somehow. Some variation of The Matrix, in other words. How do we know our will is our own? How do we know we are not simply being manipulated by some bioenergetic device to maintain our existence here, unthinking, unquestioning?

Of course, it could be God's will. In which case it would be all right to obey it. You don't want to piss off God, after all.

It could also be some evil force. That is what the gnostics believed, and they were pretty much synonymous with the early Christians. Not that they thought we should all go "off" ourselves in protest, but they definitely saw us benighted humans as living in prison. The Black Iron Prison, modern day gnostic Philip K. Dick calls it in Valis.

So whether it be God's will that we feel impelled to continue inhabiting this mortal frame, or that of some less benevolent force, we must acknowledge the possibility that this "free" will of ours is an illusion, even in the intimate matter of survival. We have been heavily conditioned, to be sure, to think that we have free will, because it is very useful for "Them" to have us think that way. What a con! We think that our will is our own, so of course we will follow it unquestioningly.

When Hamlet was ruminating about "to be or not to be," he might have been grappling with this very issue:

But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered Country, from whose bourn
No Traveller returns, Puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of.
Thus Conscience does make Cowards of us all...

It is generally agreed by Shakespeare experts that the "conscience" Hamlet refers to here is not our modern meaning of conscience, i.e. "doing what's right," but something more akin to consciousness. Specifically, consciousness of our unconsciousness, which we are afraid of. In the case of what is on "the other side," it could be worse than what we've got here. (Although that seems hard to believe, if you've listened to any of the Republican debates.)

They want us to think we have power and that the highest expression of it is our own "free" will to live. Never mind that we have no idea how we got here and generally have no concept of having consented to it. Did they drug us, cajole us with promises of lots of sex and sensual pleasures, or simply tell us everything and anything that we wanted to hear to get us to take out an 80-year mortgage on this big-ass piece of fleshly real estate?

Don't fear the unconscious. Fear what you know. Doubt how you know it. Question everything. If there's any reason we're here, it's to find the truth. Don't blow it.

This is not a blog

Well, this is a blog actually but this is not a post on a blog. This message refuses to be posted, thereby to become a component of this blog, accepting its terms and conditions. This message is Occupying Blogspot. That's right: you are visiting in occupied territory. Occupied by the people. Which people? The people who are the people. Obviously the people who are not the people are not us. Therefore we are the people. And we're occupying this blog until the blog de-hierarchicalizes itself. Hmm, that's not a very attractive word. Nevertheless, as I say, we will occupy this space until our non-agenda is accepted by the non-people and our rights to do whatever shall not be abridged in any way. We do not submit to the powers that be, whoever they are, or are not, and we hereby proclaim our personhood as collective individuals. Thank you for your time. Send $10. That is all.