Physicist: The Entire Universe Might Be a Neural Network

Originally Posted by Busby

I've tried to point out a couple of times on SF just how odd it is that we, I mean each of us as well as all the rest of creation accept the fact of living almost as if there is a hidden part of us that knows what it's all about. In truth we should be shocked out of our shoes to realise that we are actually 'here'. Most children pop the question 'mummy, where do I come from?' at about the age of six or seven. The stork usually suffices as an answer.
The absolute staggering, shocking, remarkable, extraordinary, incredible, flabbergasting realisation that I/we (and presumably everything) is/are in a state of awareness should be shouted from the roof tops every morning.

We don't realise that this universe didn't exist until we were born!

There are 8 billion of us and countless elephants, bees, sheep, grasses, dandelions, mountains, seas and so on, all of which cannot be explained.
Many of us humans take life as granted, - 'it is so', an attitude that can be fully accepted - after all it doesn't seem as if we actually asked to be here.

I personally am not on this forum because of some biblical god or far eastern philosophy but because I have experienced happenings in my life which defy any explanation, lying outside the rules and regulations set by logic.
Naturally any attempt to give an idea of how this all came about catches my interest every time. I'll listen to anything from any of the 8 billion individual universes which are at the moment on this planet. (if there is a planet).

My suggestion that we could ask the rice planter standing up to his knees in the paddy fields in Vietnam for an explanation didn't get much response here in SF - but would have been as valid as anything else.

That part about experiencing things lying outside the rules and regulations set by logic is one I can relate to. When I was young I was convinced that science and logic could deliver a rational explanation for any question one might think to ask. My regret came when it occurred to me I would not live long enough even to accumulate the ones it had already answered. Perhaps it can answer anything, perhaps it cannot. But most assuredly, if it can, I expect the vast majority of those rational explanations are beyond the capacity of my mind to comprehend, regardless of how long I live. No matter how far a dog tilts it head to one side or the other, there are things it cannot understand.

At one time that thought bothered me a great deal, now I seem to find satisfaction in it. Any reality constructed in a way in which my limited intellect could understand and explain everything, would be a disappointing one indeed. A fact is a solid, bounded, and reassuring thing, but mysteries have no boundaries that we know of, and I expect there is always a trade off to be had between comfort and adventure.

I completely agree with your point about asking the rice planter for his thoughts, or the brick layer, or the line worker. Formal education can have a way of closing minds to some things as it opens them to others. Sometimes the trade is not an advantageous one for the student. When I read that line I immediately thought about a part in Hess's Siddhartha. Toward the end when Siddhartha looks back at the silly people and no longer finds them so silly, no longer sees himself as so far above them. When Siddhartha was young and petulant, he found life to taste rather bitter and putrid and wanted to spit it out. As he ages and nears the end of his life, he comes to understand that taste is not in the food, nor on the tongue, but rather in the mind and even in the spirit. The boy may hold his nose at a slice of limburger cheese, while the old man appreciates the mild flavor and creamy texture. Life, once one learns to stop evaluating its taste against how one thinks it should taste, can become a food that one can acquire a taste and appreciation for, one that nourishes the soul and helps it to grow.

"Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers." -- Aldo Leopold

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