"We are most likely in a simulation."
~Elon Musk
In so far as the technological advancements of this decade have been nothing short of remarkable, we are starting to see the earliest sign of - a once believed to be far-fetched and all together dramatic theory, possibly being proved to be correct. I am talking of course about Simulation Theory dear reader, and if you don't think we live in a simulation, well… the hope of this article would be to maybe shift your focus to some factors you perhaps had never even considered before this very moment. To start it off, we must consider the very end… the very, very, very end… the absolute final moment.. A moment we all know and perhaps dread. The moment of death.
What happens after we die? Frankly a bonobo monkey would have a better chance of explaining that to you than I ever would, or anyone else for that matter. A better question to ask would be, what happens to you when you are very, very, very close to death, or as we mortals call it, near death. Well dear reader, of near-death experiences, largely thanks to the internet, we have a collection of clinically studied and scientifically tested data of first hand accounts of near-death experiences. In the US alone, about 9 million people have reported a near-death experience, as per a 2011 study. A fascinating point I discovered during my
research on this matter, of which all doctors reading will chuckle on my ignorance, was the medical differentiation between clinical death and permanent death, with the former being reversible (post-arrest resuscitation) and the latter, of course, being terribly final.
Most near death experiences occur during this period of reversible clinical death (when the heart stops pumping blood). Now while experiences can be varied, and are likely heavily influenced by a persons upbringing, social status, religion etc., there are some glaringly common experiences that are said to happen. One of these experiences is a "life-review". Not the same life-review you get when you're in the headmasters office and he asks you, "Do you know why you are here?". No, this is an entirely different life-review whose details can be fantastical and other-worldly. During this experience, patients report floating above there body, being able to see their comatose self from above (extracorporeal sensations), to see the people surrounding them. As it gets more intense, patients report being able to look back at their life in incredible detail, not only to watch what had happened like a movie but to experience the emotions of that time and the feelings they were going through and, this is where it gets even more mind-blowing, they were able to experience the feelings and emotions of the people they had interacting with in their life! So if a patient had wronged a close relative, the patient would then somehow be in the relatives shoes, and feel and experience the pain the relative went through as a result of the patients actions. This specific point of shared consciousness and or dual-feelability as I call it… segways us nicely to our ultimate topic of discussion - Simulation theory.
If we look at Simulations in the modern day, the most obvious example is video-games. Video games have advanced to the point of near indistinguishability from real life, thanks to engines like the Unreal Engine 5. Virtual Reality games are still a ways away from the realistic perfectionism we expect from a life simulation, but one experience everyone who has played a VR game for any prolonged period of time will tell you, is that they quickly forget that they are in a virtual game and become fully immersed into it - often to the point of confusion or delirium when they come back to 'the real world'. This lays the foundation that currently, right now, at this very exact moment, there are people getting lost in VR games whose graphics look like they should be played on a PS 2. With developments in Artificial Intelligence and increasingly stronger engines, humanity will eventually create a VR simulation game that will be perfectly indistinguishable from our current reality. At that crux, humanity will have to decide if they want to continue their lives in the perfect, simulated world… where every whim and want will be taken care of immediately (with a small subscription fee of course), or remain in the real world with all its pains and discomforts and tribulations… but I digress here, my good reader.
One last point to reach the apotheosis of my argument. The reason I bring in the concept of video games, is because the life-review phenomenon discussed earlier in the article, is one that can be programmed into video games. As early back as Counter-Strike, the massively popular online first-person shooter game, players who died in the game could review every action they took that led to their death, but not only that, they could replay the point of view of the player that killed them! This simple change in perception technique in such games is called Killcams, and utilizes recording each players gameplay and playing it back when a specific player is killed.
This tells us that our lives, and everyone else's lives are constantly recorded and "stored" somewhere. Personally, I think it is stored in the collective consciousness of humanity that makes up what we think of as God... but again, I digress. If this is the case that the entirety of our lives is recorded, that not only do we feel ourselves to be alive and unaware of a simulation, except in times of near-death where we enter into that "Killcam" zone where we can review not only our life but everyone else's life that we have interacted with, then a mounting body of evidence deposits itself on our unsuspecting laps that we do, in fact, live in a simulated reality. Just by looking at the developments of VR simulations and computer graphics currently, and multiplying its progress exponentially over the years, we see a clear trend towards Simulation theory being proved correct.
Why this simulation exists? Who created it? What is its ultimate conclusion… ? I would need a lifetime of writing to find any sort of answer to those questions dear reader, and even then, perhaps only at deaths door would I find the truth.
So my fellow wonderer, don't let this new information addle your brains - if this is a simulated reality, it is one of those games where there is a hint of free will. Each of us seem to be a "playable character", and while at times other people may seem to be "Non-Playable Characters" or NPCs as they are commonly known, trust me that if you were to undergo a life-review, you would surely experience every emotion they ever experienced and the stunning realization would fill your soul, that every human being in this planet is you, that every soul is part of one soul, and we are all just playing one big game called Life. L. S. Thomas
If rebirth, whether as a human or another living creature, is a reset button, does the subconscious mind - controlling the creature - remember past experiences?
Think of it in this way, when a Counter Strike character respawns, this character does not remember what had happened but the human operating the character may recall (or out of ignorance, forget) the tragedy.
Akin to the Counter Strike player, does the subconscious mind (maybe soul or spirit) recalls it's creature's experiences after respawning?