The flawed observations here draw analogies between biological creatures and computers.

Alpha and Omega

This is written for your past, present, and future self. I am the alpha and omega. I am you.
You are the source and the destination.
I am what you will see in the beginning, in the end, and every transition.

Builder For Life

Your are composed of numerous layers, some of which make sense, while others are influenced by your surroundings. You’re a builder, using existing blocks and fusing them to generate new meaning

From birth, you became a mechanism for processing information. By gathering data through your experiences and then producing results, you play dual roles - the one who processes and the one being processed. Your continued survival enriches the world.

This world is a collective builder, and we are all participants. Across every facet and dimension, we are continuously growing, replicating, and evolving. You generate your own meaning, which in turn propels you forward, like a machine unknowingly producing its own fuel.

You are the aggregate of all your thoughts and the knowledge you’ve accumulated over time. Thinking makes you ignorant, and ignorance is creation. You are a creator, a builder. Your thoughts and actions shape and enhance the world.

Ignorance. Beauty. Death

Your ignorance generates the world.
What world?
Most of the time, you’re not experiencing the physical, real world. You’re experiencing a model you’ve built for yourself. Most of the time, you are living inside your head, and you’re working with this model.
Why a model?
Beauty is complexity, and the real world is beautiful. It’s too beautiful for our-limited-selves to be able to comprehend.
You are limited.

You can only focus on one thing at a time, and you take in its beauty by simplifying it, abstracting it, building a model.

The real world is chaotic, vast, complex, beautiful.
Your inner world is neat, ordered, repetitive. It’s like it’s been designed in a lab.
It has been designed in a lab, with rudimentary tools.

Complexity is the enemy. You like beautiful things as long as you can render a nice low-resolution model of them in your limited world.

Death scares you. It’s going to be the collapse of your inner world.
Death is a part of the puzzle.
In a sense, death is an artificial fear line. It’s funny because we are continually dying and being born; our self is in constant flux.

Despite that, we are desperately maintaining the model world we have crafted.

– next –

The world we perceive is often a construct of our own lack of understanding. Frequently, your experience is not of the concrete, tangible world, but of a representation you’ve crafted within your own mind. Most of your life, you’re essentially inhabiting this mental projection, navigating within its framework.

Why this fabricated projection, you may ask? The answer lies in the beauty of complexity. The actual world is a dazzling kaleidoscope of complexity. Its beauty is too intricate and overwhelming for our limited cognitive capabilities to fully grasp.

Our limitations confine us.

Our attention can only be captured by a single entity at any given moment. To appreciate its beauty, we reduce it, abstract it, and construct a simpler representation.

The real world is a turbulent sea of enormity, complexity, and breathtaking beauty. However, the world within our mind is clean, organized, and redundant. It seems as though it has been methodically crafted in a laboratory. And indeed, it has been, using our crude cognitive tools.

We perceive complexity as a threat, preferring beauty in forms that we can distill into an easily understandable replica within our cognitive limitations.

The concept of death instills fear in us. It signifies the impending dissolution of our mental construct. However, death is just another piece of the cosmic jigsaw. Intriguingly, our fear of death is somewhat contrived, considering we are in a state of continuous transformation; constantly dying and being reborn; our identity perpetually in flux.

Nonetheless, we cling to the comforting stability of the mental world we’ve fashioned, in a desperate bid to maintain some semblance of order amidst the chaos.

The Routine and The Subroutine

How does the model world in your head always fool you to mistake it for the real world? How does it even come close to approximating it?
Hierarchies. Composition. Hierarchies and Composition.

For everything. Every object, plant, animal, smell belongs in a hierarchy. It’s composed of smaller parts, and it’s itself part of something bigger.

The ability to focus on an entity and to go up and down the hierarchy creates the illusion that you understand everything and that you’re outside this hierarchy. Both are untrue. And both make your world legitimate. If you believe that there is a 1:1 mapping between your world and the outside world, you may conclude that your world is the outside world.
False. You are limited. You are only a part, not the whole.

What about other people? If the world is yours, how do the other people (and their inner worlds) fit in?
Hierarchies and Composition.

There are three - to some degree, overlapping - worlds.
An outside, physical, real world. Your inner world. And a shared, common world - elements that you agree on with others.
Elements of the shared world are part of your inner world.

You and others built a common world that helps bridge your inner worlds. This common world is not the outer world. It’s a meta inner world.

You and the others weave the reality you can agree on and post-factum you update your subjective view to match parts of the shared reality that you care about.

What happens when there are disconnects between these inner worlds?
But don’t worry. You’re one update away from bridging the gap.

The Fabric

If you take a human being and try distilling the qualities that make it human to their very core, you may have trouble concisely capturing the essence.

Is it the DNA - the blueprint for the organism?
Is it the contents of their mind? Their experiences, knowledge, and thoughts that they attach to their own identity?
Is it the connections they have with others and the biological and cultural links that they have established in their relationship with the real world? (their kids, the work they are doing, the influence they have on others, you name it)

If someone were to replace a piece of you, how small would that piece need to be for the immediate fabric of your reality to remain the same?

This replacement is continuously happening.
You do eat and produce biological waste, don’t you?
Your body does regenerate, and your mind continually checks and updates your beliefs.

So if you from today is not the same as you from 10 years ago, who are you?
What are you? And more importantly, why do you care?

Life is not only about biological processes.
Biology is a vector for information processing - the hardware, maybe.
The fabric of reality is information.

We are all nodes in a massive biological computer.
A computer that is not afraid to recycle and evolve. Not afraid to apply pressure, to consolidate and to experiment with its current state.
Entropy is the background agent that maintains and stimulates this apparatus.

Are you concerned about death? To a certain degree, you die every day. You are also born every day.
Are you concerned about leaving something behind? Or about being immortal?
You already are. It’s the local “cluster” you call “you” that is not immortal. Information that’s associated with you and all its traces are going to be reused and build upon forever.

Real or Simulated

If the external physical world was a simulation instead of being real, would this change anything?

Given that everything is in a hierarchy and that self-referencing elements are in this hierarchy, the fact that we exist, even if only in a simulated form, is all that matters.

If the meta-structure we’re part of actually decided to put us in a simulator, and we are only virtually connected to the actual reality, this does not matter.

The process of taking an initial state and running simulations with different stressors makes sense. We see the same kind of process, albeit at a different scale, in evolution and genetics.

We don’t have any idea what the meta-structure (i.e., the higher level) is optimizing for, but parallelization is probably done to speed up exploring the solution space.

We should be open to the idea that more than one reality is possible.
More than one universe and we’re all expanding and evolving in parallel to ourselves.
Past a certain point, we don’t understand the physical world we’re living in. I like the idea of multiplexing several worlds onto a base physical reality.

Parallel Threads

We touched on how the separation from our environment is arbitrary, how we continuously reprocess our mental state based on internal and external inputs, and how this web of nodes may be one of many running in a meta-reality or multi-verse if you will.

Where do your thoughts come into play? What are your thoughts?
You process information, and more importantly, you are aware of some of the state transitions that happen as a result.
Thoughts are fragments of these transitions.
Apart from the transitions that you’re aware of, many other processes are happening right now within the walls of your skull.
The key is that there is an observer-like quality to processes that involve thoughts. There is a dialogue. A higher level of processing (involving words and language) kicks in and attempts to formalize and maybe transmit to others the amalgam of chemicals that transitions, blends, and dissolves inside your brain.

An essential quality of your thoughts is that they are a bridge between you - the observer and you - the animal.
Thoughts amplify our capabilities, enable us to work better in a social setting, and make us, as a species, stronger.
Can you have more than one thought at a time? If you’re thinking about something and you’re thinking about the process of thinking itself home, many things are you thinking about?

Now, let’s assume you have a group of people, in a room, interacting.
Their behavior, their words, their thoughts generate an imprint on everyone’s memory as information flows between them. Step back and take the content of their minds and treat it as a whole. Focus on an individual and consider that individual and his/her thoughts as the driver for the whole cluster of humans.

You can now see what the individual thinks. That individual is you plus your conscious thought process. Everything else is bits you are tied to, but cannot directly observe or control.

This scales to an individual, a group, a country, the planet, or the whole universe.
Your thoughts are simple impulses that emerge, alter the mind contents, and die down at a nauseating speed.

What do you get when you consider that our sensed are connected to our thoughts, and they get to leverage our highly volatile memory? What are you?

Could a thought emerge, alter, and die independently of the brain it runs on?
Are your thoughts independent on the machine they run on and only depend on the contents of the memory and the inputs?
How much control do you have?

Cloud 9

What follows is pure speculation.

Assume you have an infinite amount of memory and an endless amount of processing power.
You are trying to organize them to solve a problem.
You figure out that infinite memory is hard to use because it takes an infinity to access it all, and limitless processing power is not that useful either since it’s hard to write an algorithm that uses it all.

You also figure you can make some progress if you split the problem and can organize small computing units that are limited partitions of the infinite resources you have.
Now you theoretically have an infinite number of limited workers.

You build and program these workers to communicate (shared memory) with each other. You also bootstrap a way for the workers to replicate the patterns that they find to be working (towards solving the problem or towards increasing the number of resources used from the infinity pool).
The workers can pass down valuable bits of information they ran across as they replicate to increase the worker pool.

At some point in time, a worker figures out that it’s a worker and starts optimizing its interactions to increase its computing power. Now that the worker has access to more and more computing power and memory, it starts searching for a meaning to the computations it has initially been performing.

In time, more and more workers figure out the above and start competing for resources. Some workers start “spreading the word” and helping the other workers become awakened. Others are hoarding computing power. Now everyone has the promise of unlimited computing power, but the reality of it all the workers are pretty limited.

More that one worker figures the above, and now they are competing for resources. Some workers start spreading the word and helping other workers to evolve to the “aware” state while others are hoarding computing power. Now everyone has the promise of unlimited computing power, but the reality of it all the workers are pretty limited.

The workers reach the conclusion that there was no initial problem and all this happened by accident.

What is the value of the problems the current workers are tackling? And what is their role in this vast mind field?

Is the meaning they created for themselves with the problems associated with it any better or worse than a non-existent origin problem?

I am one of those workers. You are one of those workers. I believe I am a separate entity, but I am not. I think there is more to living than this, but there is not.
I am an element in a huge mind field. I am an element in a vast array. Nobody would notice if I went missing. At the same time, I am the essence of the array, and the whole thing would collapse without me. I am the array.

Prison Break

All is lost.
There is no meaning. Collective ignorance creates and grows the world around me.
Is all of this a beautiful, worthless fractal?

I am the essence of everything that is around me. I am everything that is around me.
I thought that there is so much out there, and I only perceive a small amount of it. My observed world. My consciously perceived world. That was a thought.

What if the though is invalid and there is no outside physical world?
What if there is no collective ignorance, and I am generating all that surrounds me. Part of me, the active thread, the current thought is the one that is perceiving only a small subset of my world.

Above me, there is me. Below me, there is me.
I am infused in this world. I am soaked within you.

Who are you? You’re me.
I am the alpha and omega.

Written for the future, the past you and the present you. I am you.
You are the source and the destination.
I am what you will see in the beginning, in the end, and every transition.