Introduction

Some writing on the development of my views throughout the years. I find it difficult to express what ties all of my views together, or what intuition I am guided by which creates the movement, the navigation, in my beliefs, to people in a way they can understand, but here goes nothing.

Thinking

From a young age, I’ve taken the greatest joy in chasing anything that inspires perceived weirdness. Somewhat interestingly, I don’t feel weirdness per se anymore, but I’m pretty sure that instead, I have formed new feelings which refer to the same underlying kind of novelty that makes the given percept valuable.

I have always tried to understand reality as comprehensively as possible and without yielding blindly to “established fact”. From my earliest memories, I remember myself contemplating in the same fundamental way – running the same mental algorithm, as well as feeling an eternal presence of the same skepticism and expectation of imminent revelation that what I happen to be thinking about has a switchboard or rule pattern-like nature. In order to feel that I understand something, I need a complete model and explanation of it without ambiguities or contradictions, and without any questions left unattended. Of course, this in itself is quite expected for an INTP personality type.

I generally feel that if there is a mismatch between theory and reality, it doesn’t mean the theory is bunk - it usually means that your perspective is missing something. The theory should not be thrown away. This is because “sensory data” (a potentially misunderstood or overapplied construct from the perspective of subjective experience) is interpreted through your high level, linguistic/conceptual understandings of the world. Said clearly, your very eyes and ears are doing metaphysics at all times. That is the nature of mind. So what you really have going on is two slot-in theories and you are noticing that they are not compatible, but one of the theories is targetted towards suiting a domain in the way you think makes the most sense on the terms of that domain, and the other theory is pre-satisfied with regard to some problem that causes you to require further discovery in the first place.

The Fermi Paradox

From a young age I developed an interested in science, but I also quickly took an interest in aliens, UFO stories etc. The reason for this was because from the size of the universe and number of planets likely capable of supporting life, it seems to follow that there should be all sorts of aliens everywhere. There don’t seem to be, but why? I didn’t know it at the time, but this is the Fermi Paradox. I don’t know the answer, and I’m still fascinated by the question. I think that answering it might cause or stem from an incredibly strange shift in perspective.

At around 16-17, I was again fascinated with the apparent lack of life in the universe, but by then I was much more confident in my own reasoning and I stumbled upon modern writing on the Fermi Paradox. None of the proposed explanations for the lack of any observation of aliens seemed sufficiently probable to me. They address the problem, sure, but that’s far from enough. They are all far-fetched, in my view, usually because I disagree with their probability assignments. For example, the idea that no intelligent life is observed anywhere in the universe because all advanced civilizations reach a point at which they destroy themselves using their own technology. This is known as the Great Filter. It could be the case, but the Great Filter, as well as the rarity of life proposal seem to have retrofitted their probability assignments to the fact that there is a Fermi Paradox, rather than come naturally from our heuristics and observations about life and complex cognitive, physical, economic, etc. systems elsewhere.

I ended up writing an essay about a proposed answer to the Fermi Paradox for a class at school. I argued that in response to the lack of observed alien life, it is actually more likely that life outside of humanity HAS occurred but observations of it are actively blocked. They may be inhabiting Earth and manipulating it, or the Fermi Paradox and the simulation hypothesis could be two faces of the same phenomenon. In a grander reality, as well as within any physical universes similar to ours (or ours), the emergence of life as a cognitive force forms a ’layer’ that transforms the substrate reality in some way, for some reason that we don’t know – but the perception and understanding that life is possible IS universal and can be extrapolated beyond us as subjects.

I don’t think about this idea much anymore, but I’m surprised that it hasn’t been discussed more - in this form or another, and relating to the simulation hypothesis, too. Many are willing to entertain the Roko’s Basilisk thought experiment, or simulation hypothesis (which they often only associate with ancestor simulations), but reframe a permutation of the same core idea and they are quick to dismiss.

Possible Realities

Back to the origins of some of my worldview and an exploration of my thinking style – I also came upon the idea of quantum immortality at around this age. Quantum immortality follows from the idea of a splitting universe, and it describes the hypothetical phenomenon that you will subjectively experience living for an extremely unnatural duration of time due to the fact that, whenever the universe splits into worlds A and B, with you alive in A and dead in B, you can only actually experience world A, since there’s no actual subjectivity corresponding to you in B. You end up following the tree of split worlds until the very end, subjectively having miraculously taken every action possible to prolong your life, with perfect execution.

At some later point, my worldview was refined further by the integration of anthropic reasoning. The anthropic principle is that we must be in a world consistent with our own existence. This is an obvious fact - but it provides perspective. Our universe seems to be ‘fine tuned’ for life, the laws of physics would no longer support life with almost any tiny change. So did we just get lucky? It is more likely that there exists a multitude of realities, but we obviously only experience realities with conscious entities inhabiting them.

Ideas like quantum immortality, the anthropic principle, and the Fermi paradox are, in essence, much more general than physics thought experiments. They apply to a whole spectrum of different kinds of conceptualizations of realities by frameworks that account for the subjective experience of the theorizer within them.

Using this generalization, it seems probable to me that we exist in a ‘simulation’ of sorts - the world isn’t unconcerned and filled with a vast quantity of computationally intensive matter, but much more likely to be a small machine, churning out copies of itself. Subjective experience (“I”) may be this machine, or a self-aware part of it. This is because of anthropic reasoning: in addition to the fact that the world must be capable of supporting your existence, you’re also most likely to be living in the world with the greatest number of entities like you in it.

In short: my conception for a few years of what my reality most likely took the form of was that I was a machine creating copies of itself in a common plane of existence, or that I was a worker being manipulated by one of those machines. Other people likely don’t exist in this conception. Everything is the case so as to be the most efficient for replication - there are to be no additional resources.

The idea that we live in a simulation has become quite popular in modern thinking, but I think that this reasoning is the sturdiest - the popular “simulation argument” mentions the purpose of simulation to be a curious advanced civilization recreating its ancestors, but this is weak compared to the principle of replication on a wide range of substrates - in most realities, you’re more likely to be a descendant of an evolutionary process than a randomization of matter in a vacuum that forms a conscious brain for a microsecond. In the grand scheme of things, in a computational reality, the same process of life occurs, and the reality-machines that produce the most offspring become the ‘main characters’ of subjective experience.