The iconic BBC cult TV show Red Dwarf produced a cracking concept that has remained with me over the decades since I first watched it. The show in question has the crew facing off the effects of a despair squid, which made them hallucinate that they were in a computer game and that the encounter with the squid was game over for them. As they exited the game they were forced to confront their real lives outside the ‘fake’ reality of the game.
So this got me thinking about a more abstract question about the purpose of life itself. When we are done, we could well face some sort of reckoning afterwards, after all multiple religions talk about that sort of thing. There is the supposed Gates of heaven where St Peter evaluates how you lived and determines whether you enter heaven or face hell. In fact it is common in religions that in order to reach nirvana, or Valhalla or whatever favourable afterlife then you need to have fulfilled some conditions in the way you live this life.
So we then have this comedy construct of two people queuing up awaiting their reckoning and discussing their lives and expectations when it is their turn to petition for access into the good place. Many a great joke is made here too, but how far from the truth could this be? Will we have the time to assess our life before whatever is next?
In my head then, cones this notion that upon death we are suddenly confronted with this afterlife persona that encompasses multiple lives spent engrossed in the living world, each life apparently oblivious to each other and only remembered upon death when we rejoin this larger version of ourselves. But what would be the point? Why would an entity repeatedly subject themselves to ‘living’?
Plug in the idea that we are all living in a simulation, and we have the beginning of an interesting Sci fi that explores existential angst….
But I digress.
Let’s get a little philosophical about this. I think therefore I am.
That is the first point of consideration made when exploring existence. Why do I think? What purpose does it fill?
We could delve into science at this point and talk evolutionary advantage and emergent properties of our brains make up, but as interesting as all that is, I think that misses the point.
Let’s get back to Descartes original point. He needed a starting point to begin to make sense of everything and so he went to first principals – what do I know for sure? Everything else after this becomes caught up in conditions and assumption, but I would posit the next step to be:
I experience therefore I am living.
So of course there are so much tied in to what is meant by experience and living, but I want describe the simple idea that I, as a conscious being who thinks , can interact with the world around me, and this is living.
OK now the important next step is, I have no way to validate that this applies to anyone I meet in this world. For all intents and purpose they may as well be as non player characters in the computer game of my life. I cannot read their minds, and even if I could I still couldn’t determine whether that is just part of the ‘ game’. If I could switch bodies and inhabit their brains, I still couldn’t prove anything definitive because it would still be my point of view, just with different sensations.
In essence, all we can be sure of is that our actions interact in the world and affect it, and we take it on faith that the people we meet are essentially in the same boat as us- separate conscious beings who think and interact with the world around them.
What does this mean? Ultimately we can never know whether that assumption is true, so effectively we may as well be in our own private universe, and everything we interact with is here solely for our personal benefit.
Does it matter then what we do? We could break laws and take what we want and live however we want, surely? And so we come back to the afterlife conjecture—the idea of a reckoning. The idea of two beings discussing post death the most recent incarnation.
It could well be that we are extra dimensional beings plugging in the simulation of our universe and living lives for some purpose unknown to us until we leave the simulation; or that we are souls being tested by a godhead for the next phase of existence, but like so much else it is just conjecture, and we have no way of knowing.
Personally, I would take the view that while we may live in our own private bubble universe, that’s not to say we don’t bump up against others in their own universes, and when conditions are favourable we can affect each others universe.
I realize this can seem a compromise to the accepted view of each one of us living in the same universe with independent souls. But it has one advantage over that. In a singular universe inhabited by multiple souls we are just one particle swept up in the ebbs and flows of consensus, insignificant and potentially irrelevant. But in a personal universe we are the most important thing in our universe as it exists solely for us. Still don’t see how this changes things? This is more powerful than just a physiological tool to boast one’s ego.
Consider what we are discovering about the quantum realm. Specifically the fact that certain particles behave differently under observation. The very fact that we are observing them changes the way they behave, such that we have to produce different rules to explain how things work at that level. Let’s extrapolate that idea up and put it alongside I experience therefore I am living.
The very fact that we’re experiencing, i.e. observing our universe, is fundamentally changing the behavior of the universe. In the first case that we all inhabit a common universe, your observations and therefore your changes to that universe will be mitigated by the observations of everyone else., but not in your personal universe.
Well great, I hear you say, but surely it doesn’t matter as the particles will change behavior from their unobserved pattern to the observed pattern regardless of the identity of the observer?
That may be true, but we don’t yet understand why the change happens in the first place. It could well be a result of the interaction with whatever it is that makes us conscious – that emergent property of our brains composition. If that is true, then the next step is to consider how we can use our conscious thought to affect changes to our benefit.
That mitigation effect in the common universe version then becomes an issue, as we would need a group consensus in order to affect the universe, however in the personal universe it becomes more a matter of will.
So are we talking some Matrix style stuff here? Potentially! Consider now the testimony of successful people and keys to their success. Many use affirmations as a way to focus themselves on a goal. This is often simply the act of repeating a desire or target results frequently e.g. daily, and then they describe its as if the universe is providing the path to their goal.
Alternatively you have the practice of prayer, which also has the act of asking God for things to help you or others in life, and many confess to having their prayers answered.
I used to consider it to be simply that by focusing your mind you are now more aware of things that can help you achieve your goal, but is this all there is to it? What if that continual act of focusing on a desire affects the universe in the same way as observing a particle changes its behavior?
Naturally then, this will more significant to your personal universe, ultimately giving you the power to shape it how you wish, but also to be solely responsible for how you lived when your bubble inevitably pops.
Right now I cannot say how much truth there is in all this rambling, and no doubt there are plenty of people that will want to rip apart my conjecture here, and that’s fine, because when it’s all said and done:
It’s my universe and I’ll believe what I want to!! 😉
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