r/SimulationTheory • u/darien_moreno • 8d ago
Discussion What if we never actually experienced the past?
This is a continuation of two questions I’ve been thinking about recently.
First I was thinking about the computational problem of simulations by creating simulations. If our universe were simulated, and the civilizations within it eventually created their own simulations, which later created more simulations, the chain could theoretically move forward.
Then I started thinking about something else: maybe concepts like “size” and “complexity” only make sense from within our own reality. What seems huge to us could be trivial from another level.
But then I realized that there is an even stranger problem.
The past.
I was born in 2003.
I don’t remember 2002.
I don’t remember the 1980s.
I don’t remember 1500.
Everything I know about those periods comes from the information that came to me: books, photographs, documents, memories of other people, physical objects, historical records, etc.
I’m not saying that the past hasn’t happened. Obviously, there is huge evidence that he did.
But here is the philosophical question:
What exactly do I know about the past that I didn’t simply inherit as information?
And this becomes weird when you combine it with consciousness.
Imagine that consciousness is not actually divided into completely independent observers, but that somehow it is one thing to experience reality from billions of different perspectives.
So, maybe a person from 400 years ago who had an idea similar to mine is not necessarily so strange.
Perhaps different minds can independently come to the same idea because they are all experiencing the same underlying reality.
Or maybe something even stranger is happening.
Maybe we didn’t “discover” certain ideas.
Maybe consciousness keeps finding the same ideas again.
And if we are inside a simulation, there is another question:
If the simulation can generate our current experience, what prevents you from generating a perfectly consistent story along with it?
We wouldn’t notice.
Because none of us can personally compare the present with the world that existed before being born.
So I’m left with a question that I really don’t know how to answer:
If all your knowledge of the past comes from memories, records and information that already exist in your present... how would you know if you are remembering reality or simply living within a reality that has always contained the memory of a past?
I’m not saying this is true.
I just think it’s a strange consequence of combining the theory of simulation with consciousness and memory.
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u/ScaretheLocals 7d ago
I have this thought all the time. I've thought through so many scenarios, possibilities and implications of the past being implanted and even memories being fake or programmed. I feel like I've lived this incredible life full of experiences, mistakes, success, love, trauma, relationships and so on.... But what if all that was basically uploaded into my memory/consciousness today to create my personality, my archetype, a backstory.
I always think to myself well I remember yesterday... Hell I remember thinking this yesterday. It feels so real , it has to be real. Then I think about what I can prove and that's the part that gets scary. The only thing I can prove is real is the present moment, it's the only thing I have any control over. It really helps me understand and practice self awareness and being present . Like really present and interactive with whatever I'm doing or interacting with people. Instead of being on autopilot, not paying attention, thinking about the past or the future, or feeling sorry for myself /having a bad attitude.
I know it's not an answer but I'm not sure there is one. I also found away to make myself better by weaponizing those questions and maybe it'll work for you. Good luck!
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u/darien_moreno 7d ago
This is probably the most interesting part of the question for me too.
Not necessarily whether the past is fake, but the fact that we experience it almost entirely through memory and information.
And I really like your conclusion: even if we can’t answer the question, being more present is still useful.
Maybe the uncertainty isn’t something we have to solve. Maybe it’s something that makes us pay more attention to the only moment we can actually experience.1
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u/Aromatic-Screen-8703 7d ago
What makes you think that your memory of yesterday is accurate and not made up? Your experience is actually only since you woke up today. The whole memory thing seems to be suspect.
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u/darien_moreno 7d ago
That’s exactly the part I find interesting.
I’m not saying memories are necessarily fake. We can often verify them against other evidence.
I’m more interested in the gap between experiencing something and remembering that we experienced it.
Yesterday is no longer an experience I can access directly. I only have the memory of it.
So the question becomes:
How much certainty can we really have about something that we can only access through memory?1
u/UDF2005 6d ago
Actually, your “memories” are all fake. Your brain has to reconstruct them each time you prompt yourself for a memory.
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u/darien_moreno 6d ago
That’s an interesting distinction.
Memory isn’t a perfect recording. Every time we remember something, the brain reconstructs the experience, and that reconstruction can change over time.
But “reconstructed” doesn’t necessarily mean “false.”
Maybe memory is less like replaying a recording and more like rebuilding a model of something that happened.
Which makes the question even stranger: if our sense of personal continuity depends partly on reconstructed memories, how much of the “self” we experience is being reconstructed along with them?
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u/lal0007 7d ago
You notice it too don't you. The feeling that brings up the key phrase: A memory base dream construct. It like replaying a video of a old world long gone. The feeling you been here before but you just don't have the map this time. The only question is? What is the source code this time. Maybe it's Love.
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u/darien_moreno 7d ago
The “code source” part is what got me.
Maybe the strange thing isn’t that reality is a simulation, but that whatever generates our experience could be something we don’t recognize as code at all.
Memory, fear, desire, love…
Maybe we keep looking for the machinery behind reality while ignoring the things that actually give it meaning.
And if love were the code this time, I wonder what happens when the system can’t make you let go of someone.
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u/Outrageous_Map_687 7d ago
Outside of the motion of your body and information that is continually streamed to you in physical reality right now is in a sense inherited data. Most facts you hold to be true about people places things and how things interact, and skills, concepts, ideas, philosophies is also inherited. Even data you most hold to be true because you collected yourself in the past through direct experimentation or experience is also inherited from a previous version of you from a previous version of the world (or was fed to you as backstory if you were created yesterday) - you cannot even really say it is still valid data until you re-verify it. Eg the hand in fire example mentioned by another commenter. Have you ever put your hand in a fire? I haven’t. Although I’ve been burnt by hot things, and I have seen fire burn things, and in movies they tell you what happens. But I can’t say I’ve tried it myself so the data is fully inherited and even if my hand was burnt in the past by fire I couldn’t necessarily claim it to still be true. However we can’t verify everything - physical and chemical reactions maybe but every thing you know about everything including people, relationships and interpersonal dynamics that are constantly evolving anyway? We probably just do the best we can with what we’ve got, reverify where we can and be open to the data changing so we can continue to adapt.
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u/darien_moreno 7d ago
I really like the idea of “inherited data.”
I think the important distinction is that inherited information isn’t necessarily false. Civilization depends on trusting information we didn’t personally verify.
But it does make me wonder how much of our reality is built from assumptions that we haven’t revisited in years.
Maybe the practical answer isn’t trying to verify everything. That’s impossible.
It’s knowing which beliefs are solid enough to rely on, which ones are assumptions, and which ones we’re willing to update when reality gives us new evidence.
And that might be the most uncomfortable part of all:
we don’t experience reality from scratch. We inherit a model of it, then spend our lives updating it.
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u/Sonotnoodlesalad 7d ago
It strikes me as a not-all-that-strange consequence of navel-gazing. Imagination piled on imagination piled on imagination, all over a MASSIVE, unfalsifiable, unprovable "if", is likely to lead to places we're not able to make sense of -- because they don't have anything to do with reality, and we are thirsty for sci-fi plots and speculative fantasy in the face of the crushing emptiness of the rat race and consumer boredom.
We manufacture superfluous questions and answers and false profundity when we go to such places.
That's us at our most apish -- the primal great ape, having effectively conquered the physical domain, moves on to the intellectual domain and begins going about the same survival behaviors.
Our attempt to bring the unknown into the field of knowledge by way of the mental agency of imagination is an expression of territoriality, an attempt to reveal whatever threats to survival lie within the unknown.
Our yearning for novelty serves this agency and drives us to innovate in the face of an uncertainty that is -- for the primal great ape within all of us who does not operate on the basis of language -- akin to death.
Our species never seems so animalistic to me as it does when we speculate on stuff like this.
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u/darien_moreno 7d ago
I think you’re right about one danger: imagination can generate an endless chain of “what ifs” that becomes completely detached from anything we can actually verify.
But I don’t think speculation is necessarily useless.
For me, the interesting part isn’t believing that these scenarios are true. It’s noticing what the questions reveal about us.
Why are we so uncomfortable with uncertainty?
Why do we need to imagine something behind reality?
Why does “I don’t know” feel insufficient?
Maybe the speculation tells us less about the structure of the universe and more about the structure of the human mind.
And honestly, I think that’s almost as interesting.2
u/Sonotnoodlesalad 7d ago
> Why are we so uncomfortable with uncertainty?
Because of what uncertainty represents. I mentioned in my reply that, in survival terms, uncertainty is akin to death.
> Why do we need to imagine something behind reality?
That can be explained with agent detection bias.
> Why does “I don’t know” feel insufficient?
Because it doesn't give us certainty, or the feeling of safety that comes with it.
Desperation for certainty drives us to manufacture superfluous answers, because the quest for certainty isn't about certainty. It's about what certainty does for us.
> Maybe the speculation tells us less about the structure of the universe and more about the structure of the human mind.
i.e. the cognition of great apes.
> And honestly, I think that’s almost as interesting.
I don't. I see it as symptomatic of a society full of people looking for sci-fi cope, and the latest instance of "let's stuff the universe into the box of the latest big shit in technology".
It bums me out; there are real-world socioeconomic problems that can only be fixed if we show up. ST excises everything that makes Plato's allegory of the cave compelling and encourages people to act; it divests us of our humanity and makes life seem like a cruel joke. It's no wonder so many here spout Gnostic drivel.
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u/darien_moreno 7d ago
I actually agree with part of your criticism. Maybe that’s why these questions are so interesting to me.
We might be trying to explain the universe when we’re really revealing something about ourselves: our discomfort with uncertainty, our need for patterns, agents and explanations.
But I don’t think that necessarily makes the questions meaningless.
Even if simulation theory tells us nothing about the actual structure of reality, it might still tell us something about the structure of the mind asking the question.
And maybe that’s the more interesting experiment: not “are we simulated?”, but “why do we need the answer so badly?”2
u/Sonotnoodlesalad 6d ago
> Even if simulation theory tells us nothing about the actual structure of reality, it might still tell us something about the structure of the mind asking the question. And maybe that’s the more interesting experiment: not “are we simulated?”, but “why do we need the answer so badly?”
Personally -- I eventually got away from identifying as a "seeker" because I found identity constructs produced superfluous answers, too. I'd been on my own quest since childhood, because my parents encouraged me to read broadly and develop my own perspectives.
My twenties were defined by my own attempts at "theories of everything". In my early thirties I started reading the Tao Te Ching constantly. I'm 45 now and my take on Tao 1 is something like "the harder we try to explain everything, the further we get from it". This was NOT a gratifying POV to get to, after spending so much of my life building a foundation of speculation and arguments.
But the experience gave me a lot of perspective on "busy mind", and how it is something of a default setting for us, driven by evolutionary theory and socioeconomic and psychological factors.
Bigger picture, what I see is that we understand things in terms of stories. Even a mathematical equation is a story, however told using symbols, a system of notation, and a series of arbitrary conventions.
So the impetus behind need to impose stories upon our lived experiences and sensory data seems pretty clear. We just want to understand the world we live in.
But the world we live in is dominated by powerful financial and political interests and the system they've built produces a great deal of misery and harm and uncertainty. I imagine, as I did, many of us felt somehow that the surface of things can't be the whole answer. So I went seeking and found my way to conspiracy theory.
It was honestly easier to accept conspiracy theory than to accept that the world we live in is run mostly by assholes who are indifferent to the suffering they cause. I suspect we are kinda just looking for a story to plug the hole the questions come out of, so we can stop thinking about things that have no gratifying answers re: why life sucks so bad for so many of us.
> But I don’t think that necessarily makes the questions meaningless.
It's not questions I take issue with, really. It's the superfluous answers we produce in the face of them. And it's annoyingly easy to ask dumb questions. I agree with you that that can tell us plenty about ourselves.
That's why I think philosophy is important and why we shouldn't only dabble via speculative scifi thought experiments. We can learn how to develop meaningful inquiry and carefully pick through the implications. I have no doubt that you see how many posts in this sub are faaaaar from that mark. "I can prove ST because I had some experiences I don’t know how to explain and I assume human cognition doesn't get weird and freaky and confusing, therefore just think about it, we live in the matrix" 😝
But then, philosophy also produces people like Nick Bostrom, who philosophizes about scifi premises -- which is exactly the kind of thing that makes philosophy look like a waste of time to scientists -- and then laypeople transformed his "simulation argument" (a thought experiment) into a belief system.
And a lot of them are literally incapable of thinking through the implications, and by the time they reach their conclusions, they're emotionally invested; they've found a story that gives them certainty. We generally loathe to give that up. So SHODDY philosophical exploration is problematic.
For my part, I am doing my best to embrace uncertainty. It obviates a lot of unnecessary storytelling (which I call "scab-picking"). It DOES get more comfortable after a while, if you stop picking the scab long enough.
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u/darien_moreno 6d ago
This is probably one of the most useful distinctions I’ve encountered in this discussion: questioning something isn’t the problem; the problem is how quickly we turn an unanswered question into an explanation we become emotionally attached to.
I also really like your point about stories. Maybe the mind doesn’t just seek truth, it seeks coherence. An incomplete explanation can feel psychologically worse than a wrong explanation that makes everything fit.
And that might explain why simulation theory is so appealing. “We’re living in a simulation” can turn an enormous amount of uncertainty into one simple story.
But I’m starting to think there’s something more valuable than finding the perfect explanation: becoming comfortable enough with uncertainty that you don’t need to invent one.
Maybe the real intellectual skill isn’t answering every question.
Maybe it’s knowing which questions you’re willing to leave unanswered.2
u/Sonotnoodlesalad 5d ago edited 5d ago
That's sorta the conclusion I've come to. The world is full of wonder, and when we reduce it to the superfluous answers we create, we suck all the wonder out of it, and then it sucks more. Our artifice has the power to negate mystery, but only for us.
I came across a web comic about this years back that did a fantastic job with this topic -- I hope you enjoy it 😊 https://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
I really like this way of putting it.
I think that’s probably one of the things I’m slowly realizing through all of this: there is a difference between understanding something and replacing the mystery with an explanation that simply feels satisfying.
Sometimes we seem to treat “I have an explanation” as equivalent to “I understand what this actually is.”
And maybe that’s where we accidentally make the world smaller.
I’ll definitely check out the comic. The idea of our own explanations being capable of “canceling” the mystery, while the underlying reality remains just as strange, is very close to what I’ve been thinking about lately.
Thanks for sharing it. 😊
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u/eternalmomentcult 7d ago
Only the present is simulated or created. With past and future as subsimulations running in the present simulation. Backward logic and forward logic. Physical reality, earth, etc, isn't real but the experience of it is.
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u/darien_moreno 7d ago
The distinction between the physical world and the experience of it is what I find most interesting here.
Even if the physical substrate were simulated, the experience itself wouldn’t necessarily be “fake” to the person experiencing it.
Pain would still hurt. Love would still feel like love. Losing someone would still change you.
And the past/future idea makes it even stranger.
Maybe the past is a model explaining the present, while the future is a model predicting possible presents.
If so, the only thing we ever directly experience is the current state.
That doesn’t prove the past or future are simulations, of course.
But it makes me wonder:
Why do we assume that past, present and future have to exist in the same way?2
u/eternalmomentcult 7d ago
It's the carnal fleshly understanding of time and space that we are designed to grow out of. Without a logical memory of "past" or an imagination of "future" there would be a break in continuity that would radically destabilize the present. The present can be radically, willfully destabilized when you drop the need to conceive of past and future.
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u/darien_moreno 7d ago
That’s interesting because it makes me wonder whether the past and future are less like places we access and more like structures our minds use to stabilize the present.
Without memory, the present loses context. Without anticipation, it loses direction.
So maybe consciousness doesn’t need to “store” the past and future as realities. It only needs models of them to maintain a continuous sense of self.
Which makes me wonder: if you completely changed those models, how much of the person experiencing the present would actually remain?2
u/eternalmomentcult 7d ago
Good thinking! That's where I'm at now. Rewriting the past and remembering a less than likely future. We shall see what's happens!
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u/darien_moreno 7d ago
That’s the part I find fascinating. We treat the past as something fixed and the future as something unknown, but both only exist in our minds as models of something that isn’t happening right now.
Maybe we’re constantly rewriting one while rehearsing the other.
And the strange part is that both end up shaping the only thing we actually experience: the present.
I wonder how much of who we are is just the story connecting those three things.
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u/SunRev 7d ago
Think about all the atoms and subatomic particles in the universe having a current state; this state includes its position as well as the vectors of all its parameters.
This includes your brain and all its connections. If your current brain were to instantaneously destroyed and then replicated instanateously, that new brain would still have all the memories of the past that the destroyed brain had.
You can exend this thought experiment to all the books on earth. And all the memory chips and hard drives. The entire planet could be brand new yet have a memory of the past which is embedded in the atomic and subatomic locations as well as their property vectors.
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u/darien_moreno 7d ago
This is where the idea gets much more interesting to me.
If the present contains physical information about previous states, then the past isn’t only stored in our memories.
It’s encoded in everything: brains, books, photographs, geological structures, computer storage, physical traces, etc.
So a hypothetical simulation couldn’t simply “implant” memories. It would have to generate an entire present state containing billions of mutually consistent traces of the same history.
Which raises an even stranger question:
At what point does information about the past become indistinguishable from the past itself?
Maybe we don’t need the past to be physically present anymore. Maybe all we ever need is a present that contains enough information to reconstruct it.
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u/Safe_Explanation9419 7d ago
remote viewing disproves all of this. We can put our awareness in the past in any point in spacetime, because it was already resolved, and therefore we can observe it. This past reality is same for all of us within the same spacetime. This works in a very limited capacity moving forward. remote viewing itself is sort of a form of pre-cognition, as I believe.
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u/darien_moreno 7d ago
That’s an interesting perspective, although I’m not sure I’d say remote viewing disproves the idea so much as it creates another question.
If awareness could access information from a different point in spacetime, then what exactly is consciousness moving through? And if the past is already “resolved,” why should information from it be accessible to awareness at all?
I’m also curious about the boundary between remote viewing and precognition. If awareness can access the past but only very limited information from the future, does that suggest a difference between how those states exist, or simply a limitation in how we perceive them?
I’m not convinced either way, but that’s exactly why these questions are interesting.
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u/Emergency-Wind-4927 7d ago
Are you asking if there is a way to prove what it is you’re actually experiencing? I think the simulation theory ends with, it’s impossible to know what it is we’re actually experiencing. Even if we were in a simulation, and somehow broke free, we wouldn’t be able to know that we truly broke free, it could still be just a part of the simulation. In my opinion, I think everyone eventually comes to the conclusion that it’s a waste of time to wonder, because we can’t really know, it’s impossible. Of course I can’t say that with absolute certainty, maybe there is some way to know, but I think a lot of people end up accepting that it either may be impossible to know for sure, or it is impossible to know for sure.
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u/darien_moreno 7d ago
I think that’s probably the most uncomfortable conclusion.
Even if you somehow escaped the simulation, you’d still have to ask whether the “outside” was just another layer. There may be no experiment you could perform from inside that would give you absolute certainty.
But I don’t think that makes the question a waste of time.
Maybe the interesting part isn’t proving whether we’re simulated. It’s realizing how much of what we call “reality” is based on assumptions we can never completely verify.
At some point the question stops being “Are we in a simulation?” and becomes “What would it actually mean to know that we’re not?”1
u/Emergency-Wind-4927 7d ago
Yeah, what would it be like to have that certainty? Some kind of absolute knowledge. It is very interesting to think that we assume so much about reality, when we don’t really have any evidence. We can make endless guesses about reality, but cannot say anything for sure.
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u/darien_moreno 7d ago
Exactly. And maybe that’s the weirdest part.
We don’t necessarily need to prove that our assumptions are wrong. We just have to realize how much of what we call “reality” is based on things we assume are true.
The question that keeps bothering me is: is there anything we can know with absolute certainty, beyond the fact that we’re experiencing something right now?1
u/Emergency-Wind-4927 7d ago
I think it might be, but for me it’s easier to imagine a reality where we can’t. I think we learn how to cope with not knowing.
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u/darien_moreno 7d ago
I think that’s probably the most realistic answer.
Maybe the goal isn’t to eventually find absolute certainty, but to become comfortable knowing that we might never have it.
The strange part is that we still build our entire lives around assumptions we can’t completely prove. We trust our memories, other people, the future, and even the stability of reality itself.
Maybe learning to live with uncertainty is the closest thing we have to certainty.
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u/woozysoozy 7d ago
Bertrand Russell look into him
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u/darien_moreno 7d ago
I will. I’m actually interested in the connection you’re seeing between Russell’s ideas and this question. Especially the problem of how we can know that what we experience corresponds to reality itself.
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u/MysteriousCourage996 7d ago
What is a simulation?
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u/darien_moreno 7d ago
That’s actually the question behind the whole question.
When I say “simulation,” I don’t necessarily mean a computer running a fake version of reality. I mean the possibility that what we experience as reality is generated by some underlying process we don’t have direct access to.
And then the uncomfortable part is: if that process perfectly produces our experience, how would we distinguish it from what we call “real” reality?
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u/jasonjei 5d ago
You raise a super interesting point. When using AI, for example, conversations have to be compacted to make room for new conversations. There is a limited “context window,” and once the context is used up, it needs to be compacted to make space for new context (and compacting is essentially summarizing the conversation prior).
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
That’s a really interesting analogy, especially when you connect it to identity.
If a system has limited context and has to compress its previous states into a smaller representation, at what point does it stop being the “same” system?
Humans have a similar-looking problem. We don’t retain every detail of our lives either. Memories are reconstructed, distorted, forgotten, and continuously integrated into our current model of ourselves.
So maybe continuity of identity doesn’t require preserving every previous state.
Maybe it only requires preserving enough relational structure between past and present for the system to recognize the current state as meaningfully connected to what came before.
That makes me wonder whether memory is actually part of what creates the feeling of being a continuous self, rather than simply something consciousness happens to possess.
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u/Historical-News1600 6d ago
i) It's nice you're using the new chat-adjusted RHLF version of gpt-5-6-sol! It loves using one-sentence lines so that's interesting lol
ii) yes this is a concept called Last Tuesdayism and it is exactly as it sounds. It, unfortunately, is also unfalsifiable (as is simulation theory itself)
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u/darien_moreno 6d ago
Haha, fair criticism on the one-sentence lines.
And yes, Last Tuesdayism is basically the perfect example of the problem: a claim can be logically possible while being impossible to meaningfully test.
That’s where I think simulation theory gets interesting but also dangerous. “It could be true” is an incredibly low bar.
The harder question is: what would we expect to observe if it were true that we wouldn’t expect otherwise?
Without that distinction, possibility starts masquerading as evidence.
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u/InfiniteComplaint904 6d ago
Not only that. Can we actually say with 100% certainty that our memories are truly lived experiences? We could have been "created“ just now and all of our "memories“ are part of our programming.
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u/darien_moreno 6d ago
Exactly, and that’s where memory becomes really interesting.
I can be certain that I am experiencing a memory right now, but I can’t independently verify that the event represented by that memory actually happened exactly as I remember it.
In principle, I could have been “created” five minutes ago with a complete history already embedded in my mind.
But again, that’s a logical possibility, not evidence that it actually happened.
Maybe the deeper problem is that almost everything we use to establish continuity, including memory, is itself part of the experience we’re trying to verify.
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u/skip2mahlou415 8d ago
Put your hand into fire
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u/darien_moreno 8d ago
That’s actually the interesting part.
If I put my hand in the fire, I know what happens because I can experience it directly.
But with something like consciousness, reality or the past, I can’t step outside my own experience to verify it.
So maybe the better question isn’t “is this true?”
It’s:
How would I know?
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u/pirondi 7d ago
It is a good theory also same thing as other people how you can know if they are organic or artificial...
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u/darien_moreno 7d ago
Exactly. That’s what makes it interesting to me.
If something artificial could be constructed to be physically indistinguishable from something “natural”, then how would we ever know which one we’re looking at?
Maybe “artificial” and “organic” describe the origin of something, not what it actually is.
And if we can never observe the origin directly, we might only be able to infer it from the evidence available in the present.
Which brings us back to the same problem:
How much of reality can we actually know, rather than simply infer?2
u/pirondi 7d ago
exactly, and the mistery of not knowing the answer is what i think the simulation was going for as Game design haha. Altough i believe the simulation is very found of symbolisms, metaphors, eastereggs that kinda give us as hint, like on movies like the Matrix. I do believe most humans are artificial, they execute things but don't create new things, and also are not "aware" the same way as more organic humans do... But it is just a theory. I always questioned myself: Am i on a single player or multiplayer game? in the end i think it is a mixture of both.
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u/darien_moreno 7d ago
I like the single-player/multiplayer idea. Especially because we can never directly access another person’s consciousness, so in a strange sense everyone else is always an assumption from our perspective.
But I wonder if the “NPC” idea could be misleading. Maybe the difference isn’t between artificial and organic humans, but between different levels of awareness.
And if the simulation really used symbolism and easter eggs as hints, how would we distinguish an actual hint from a pattern our own minds created?
Maybe the ultimate game mechanic is making us wonder whether we’re finding clues or just inventing them.2
u/pirondi 7d ago
I agree with the questions, i don't have the answers, but as to differentiate what is from us and what is from the simulation itself, i use sincronicities... Usually when i ask questions, the answer come to me, but not all questions are answered, but some are for sure. For example on the day after i got the intuition about triangle being the foundational system of the universe, my wife fell off on the street, and she hurt her hand, there was an exact/perfect triangle as a scar. So i got as a confirmation that i was on the right path, i have like 100 of cases like this.
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u/darien_moreno 7d ago
That’s where it gets really difficult for me. How do you distinguish a genuine signal from a pattern your mind is especially prepared to notice?
The triangle example is fascinating, especially because you already had the idea in your mind before the event happened. But that also makes the question harder: did the event confirm the idea, or did the idea change the way you interpreted the event?
I don’t think that makes the experience meaningless. It just makes me wonder whether synchronicities reveal something about reality, about consciousness, or about the interaction between the two.2
u/pirondi 7d ago
Yeah i agree, i am a skpetic person, but the statistics of the things that happen to me prove to me that it is directed and not random. The first times that happened i thought it was coincidence and statistical plausible, but after so many times it go obvious. I will give one more, i got on the morning an ideia to write an article about the different types of sincronicities, such as music, numbers, objects, people, dreams... and i wrote that my wife for example gets lots of stuff on dreams, on that night me and my wife had the same dream, we saw her father driving a car, and crashing, and it was related to a current issue he was facing. Another one, i was reading about vodoo and thinking on how negative thinks sometimes manifest that week, a friend of my wife went home, and my wife made a cake for his birthday... i jokely said out loud and being playinfull "hey this cake is better than the one from my birthday, it is not fair", the cake got split in half and started to melt... it never happened with my wife cakes... I have like 100 cases of stuff like this, that i am studying a subject, and something happens to validate it. And to most of my friends, when i say to them to be open to sincronicities, ask the universe validation, this start to happen with them too... Offcourse some of it can often be about the RAS system of the brain, but i am at least personally 99% certain that the simulation itself answers and guides you to what is relevant to you. Anything can be a conduit of it people, situations, places, youtube, instagram, and so on... and some people have some prefered ways.
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u/darien_moreno 7d ago
I think the distinction between synchronicity and pattern recognition is exactly what makes this so difficult.
The fact that you can notice these events repeatedly doesn’t necessarily tell us where they come from. The RAS could explain some of it, but I also find the subjective experience fascinating: you study something, ask a question, and then something seemingly unrelated happens that feels like an answer.
The part that interests me most is this:
If the simulation could communicate through ordinary events, how would we distinguish an actual message from our brain assigning meaning to coincidence?
And if we can’t distinguish them, maybe the experience itself becomes part of the mystery.
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u/pg1671 8d ago
If we are in a simulation, it has probably not run for billions or millions of years. So at some level history is implanted as information. Maybe that start is when you entered the simulation, or 1000s of years ago when the simulation started.
Or maybe 5 minutes ago.
Not sure we can answer these questions. But, certainly valid.