Belyea Rd - Isomorphisms, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality

Thinking about how our "normal" experience is deeply analogous (isomorphic) with virtual reality.

We all have a different idea of what is going on "beneath the surface" but much of this depends on language.

The "Matrix" idea is not as interesting as people think. In that fantasy people still have a real brain. Whether or not we actually do have a real brain or just an illusion of one seems to be hardly worth discussing. What is worth discussing is how interaction with the real world (or something!!) turns into the rich "gold standard" VR of everyday life.

Summary April 4, 2019

BOXES

One fanciful vision of the (flat) Earth was that it was supported on the back of a turtle, which was, in turn, standing on another turtle and so on: Turtles all the way down.

Similarly, I find it useful to think of "boxes within boxes all the way down." Box 1 is the world we experience "in our head," which includes all experience and everything we know. In particular, it includes what we have been taught and what we have been taught to assume, which is, to a certain extent, "programmed". Box 1 is the "matrix" of individually shared reality. But, unlike the Matrix of Science Fiction fame, our matrix depends deeply on the "real world" outside and our senses within, as eloquently explained by Antonio Damasio.

Our evolutionary survival strategy involves survival as a member of a group, or "super person". Not only do we not "think for ourselves," we can't.

We experience ourselves as objects in the world (that's me) and assume that the world exists without us. It has been here long before we were born, will still be here long after and exposes only a tiny amount of itself to our investigation. This is "Box 2". Box 2 is contained in Box 1. Thinking in "box 2" terms, we recognize that other people exist and that they have an internal world - their "Box 1" which is, to us, Box 3. Of course, there are billions of Box 3's, including Box 3's that belonged to people long dead. We are in "Box 3" when we say things like "I know what he's thinking". Language uniquely provides access to Box 3, when we ask things like "What do you see" and expect an answer that makes sense. It can get pretty crazy. It makes sense to ask if Galileo correctly understood the discoveries and system of Kepler (he didn't). In a similar vein, we can ask of the Church threatened Galileo because of his beliefs or because he was, according to what was known at the time, wrong. All this depends on an acceptance of the fact that each of us lives in our personal "Box 1". This is an unavoidable consequence of our nature. It follows that persecuting an individual for his beliefs is misguided since nobody really "thinks for themselves."

When we are speaking of experience or "external reality," we need to be aware of which "box" we are speaking from. For example, statements about objective reality belong in Box 2 and should not contain "mind-like" concepts like the "laws" of physics. Laws of physics belong in Box 1. They are statements about our experience of the world.

I allow for "Box 0", which is the hypothetical and unobservable world - beyond the reach of our cleverest instruments, observation or reasoning. Like Box 1, Box 0 is relative. We are always biting chunks off Box 0, but we must admit that there are things we will never know about the Universe. At the very least, we must, as individuals, recognize that almost all of Box 0 is beyond what we will ever understand. I assume that "Box 0" exists even if there are no observers anywhere - the situation we assume at the time of the Big Bang and millions of years after that.

I regard all of mathematics as being in "Box 1" as something "mind like." This stands against the common intuition of physicists that the Universe is somehow fundamentally "mathematical" and that we are "discovering" mathematical laws that exist apart from our minds. This assumption is certainly worth challenging, but it's good to make it explicit. Similarly, any statement that includes an "observer" or an "apparatus" is a statement in Box 1, not Box 0.  As far as I know, such "mind like" concepts can be removed from relativity and quantum mechanics without losing anything but hooks for idle philosophers to make their speculations sound "scientific."

"Theory of Boxes" takes a dim view of theories that attempt to explain either of these questions:

• Why is there anything?
• Why does it feel like something to exist (Chambers "hard question")

I am greatly aided in this skepticism by knowing that not all perfectly sensible questions have answers.  While it has not been proven that either of the above questions is formally undecidable, I think it's reasonable to think of them in this way until some future genius settles the matter. For now, at least, I proceed on the assumption that we have something called "experience" and that it is an experience of something other than ourselves. Not much of a stretch I think.

THE INTERFACE

In effect, what we call "mind" is an interface between the "real world" and "Box 1". You could say it's responsible for creating the whole stack of boxes. It is worth asking how it does this, which boils down to curiosity about neuroscience - the brain. More subtly, it involves asking about the nature of the universe we inhabit and what it takes to survive in it.

In this area of concern, we also consider how the interface is "programmed" by language and other cultural factors. Analogy plays a key role here, as outlined in "Surfaces and Essences". A key concept in that books is "isomorphism" - the idea that some analogies are better than others. In fact, the best ones allow us to learn about one system from the properties of another. For example, we assume that objects in the universe behave as if they "obey" laws of gravity (mind-like ideas). Thus, we can predict how objects will behave (say the date of an eclipse) by working out the math in the model. On a broader scale, we can ask which of our ideas genuinely underpin reality itself, the subject of "A Beautiful Question".

Evolution has gifted humans with an obsession with "figuring out what's really going on". Many of our guesses are wide of the mark and wind up as "mythology". Some are impressively robust and useful - they are called "Science". So far, we can't be sure how closely our ideas mirror the "real world", but we can help ourselves by keeping in mind the difference between our ideas (mind-like) and the actual reality we attempt to approach.

Material Intelligence

Glen Adamson caught my eye with this Aeon article caught my eye. He expands this view in his book: "Fewer, Better Things ...".

Adamson's views are relevant to this blog in a number of ways:

• The disconnect between value and cost. How the way we manufacture things makes this matter- in detail;
• The man-made world of the "matrix" we live in;
• Insight into the structure of modern society - where "things" come from, who makes them, how they become "ours"

Is God the "Ultimate Reality"?

Religion is (and still is) a means whereby cultural norms are enforced through means of authority derived from "off planet". Zero-cost credits for carrots and sticks are offered to be cashed in in that alternate universe. Religion justifies the infliction of terrible punishments in the here-and-now and has sponsored genocidal wars. Religions that we generally regard as "peaceful" seldom live up to their own reputation. Good Christian folk brought their kids to watch lynchings in the US South. Buddhism is playing a key part in the genocide of Rohingya in Myanmar and a similar role in the violent suppression of the Hindu minority in Ceylon. Religious authority is behind the rape of thousands of children and the coverup of these crimes. Religious authority enthusiastically participated in the attempted genocide of indigenous people in Canada in the residential school system.

If these are the benefits of religion, we can clearly do without them. Rational human being should not only reject "organized religion" but push back hard against the claims of religious enthusiasts to exert outsized influence on the rest of society.

That said, we must also recognize and respect the fact that, for many, the religious "matrix" is as real as our own. Moreover, the religious experience is quite real and waiting around the corner for any of us.

At one point in my life, I was an enthusiastic member of the evangelical wing of Christianity. What was I thinking? All this is usually comfortably buried under half a century of skepticism but sometimes I'm pulled back at the most unexpected moments.

On my latest dog walk as I watched the trees reaching for the light in a way that reminded me of my "Roots" analogy - how we blindly reach our roots into "reality", sucking up information for our survival. The tree does not "know" about sunlight, wind, and water, yet its existence depends on all these things. What is there "out there" that is equally vital to human beings but forever beyond our ability to understand or even suspect?  That line of thinking was 100% in line with the way I thought in 1977.

Back then, the theology of Paul Tillich was popular - he spoke of God as the "ground of all being". I recalled for the first time in decades the impressive Theology of wonder by G. K. Chesterton. My insight on the dog walk was not new, but perhaps more mature and articulate.

The world truly is wonderful. We do indeed reach out to a vast, unknown - perhaps unknowable Universe. What is more, we are rooted in this vastness. We rely on it for our existence. It is very natural for this feeling of dependence, combined with the feeling of awe and helplessness to be translated into what theologians call an "I/Thou" relationship. This means that we regard the other end of this relationship (the vast, unknowable Universe) as personal - i.e. God. Of course, it actually is personal. We are experiencing the Universe through our own brains which are alive and, in some sense, playing it to us on our "inner movie screen". That screen is not flat, dead and impersonal. It's created by live neurons in our heads. But our brains also create the illusion that what we see "out there" really is "out there".

"Professional" theologians will ignore the neuroscience and try to build a rather academic "Christian" theology on this slim foundation. In the same spirit, people make from the "First Cause" argument** that "proves" the existence of God to swallowing whatever version of Christian theology that appeals to them. Paradoxically, people of "faith" acknowledge our the palpable lack of ultimate knowledge but then turn this into a surprisingly long list of certainties large and small.

"Peak experiences" are often interpreted in whatever religious context (matrix) that's "in the air". Peak experiences are a real thing (I've had a few myself). In fact, my insight about the trees on my walk might qualify as a mini-peak experience. After years of such jolts of insight, I more readily attribute them to bipolar illness than any special insight.

Since the '70's we have been able to produce "peak experiences" quite reliably with a pill - LSD, MDMA or psilocybin. In the long run, that puts peak experiences and religion itself under the umbrella of neuroscience. Back when all this became a tsunami of "experimentation", we were also experiencing a much more cosmopolitan view of religion. In the end, this resulted in the invention of whole new religions and new religions under old names, such as what passes for "Eastern Philosophy" in California. For many, peak experiences could not stand on their own. If a matrix of religion were not readily available, one could be invented. Space aliens served as well as God. But whatever the psychic explorers thought about the details, we all agreed that there was another "level" to the Universe. Peak experiences were the door into this Universe.

There were other ideas "in the air" back in the 70's. At the time, I did not regard Christianity positive drag on human progress. I was quite aware of how empty dogma served as the glue to identify the "in group" vs the "out-group" (I called this the "Creedal Group" and eventually wrote a whole blog about it). But "hardcore" professional theology was not what people assumed it to be. Still isn't. For this, you need to attend a liberal Theology school (I went to Queens University in Kingston). It turns out that the musings of "professionals" about God are as dry and irrelevant as trigonometry. They have nothing at all to do with the daily life of a "true believer". For a true believer, Christianity makes life an adventure. The theory of it all is left to others or simply left out entirely.

There was something in the air called Liberation Theology  This pushed many in the Catholic Church "hard left"*- to see Christianity as a champion of the poor - especially in South America, where US-backed right-wing dictatorships were slaughtering the poor by the thousands. For young, idealistic folks like myself, it married political outrage to a nascent knowledge of the Bible. You can certainly read the Bible and especially Jesus this way. Back then, the "standard" portrait of Jesus looked a lot like the standard portrait of Che Gueverra.

Being smart, arrogant and gullible is a dangerous combination. I can now see that I knew nothing about Christianity, Liberation Theology, Marxism or Che Gueverra. But sometimes a sprinkling of knowledge is precisely what you need to inspire projects to save the world. For me, Christianity, or at least Jesus (interpreted correctly) was on the right side of history. It was also more fun than Computer Programming.

I am a human being - just as likely to be trapped in a matrix as anybody else. I had been warmly accepted into an open-ended social group for the first time in my life. Our awkward questions can be put on the back burner. Sometimes permanently.

In, "Going Back to Church", I take on the same subject, looking back on my theological education and the future as a Minister that I escaped through no honorable effort of my own. I write from the pews in a modern congregation with the old ladies and my 98-year-old mother in law.
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* As it turned out, the Catholic Church pushed back hard against Liberation Theology and embraced the "powers that be". The Catholic Evangelical movement (of which I was part) would become a vehicle for conventional dogma. It would not be until the elevation of Pope Frances that social responsibility - or maybe not raping little kids quite so much - asserted itself at the highest level of the Catholic Church. Just a bit.

** The "First Cause" argument is something that is only offered by people who already want to believe in God and are looking for a way stop thinking about it. It is for children.

Thoughts on Religion vs. Reality

For the moment, let me talk about the world of human experience as "E".

The world that Science investigates is assumed to exist apart from human experience, although we can only know it through human experience. Without really thinking about it, we imagine the "real world" to be about the shared experience: verifiable, consistent and augmented by what we call "reason". But we have long admitted that Universe, which I will call U, is not the same as "E". In fact, we assume that we can never know "U" entirely, directly or completely.

We all know that "E" is not the same for each of us. In fact, it is quite remarkably different between different cultures and different times or even for a single individual throughout his or her lifetime.

The question at hand is, is there anything "out there" apart from E and U?

In most religious traditions the answer is "yes".  Most religions postulate a universe in which the individual "soul" - the most important part of E  - exists apart from the individual physical body and survives death into a realm that may or may not is occupied by spirits, gods, occult forces and a whole world. Christianity specifically claims that the "soul" always exists apart from the body - an idea that appears in modern Science Fiction in many forms. Mystical traditions claim that some varieties of E (mystical experience) perceive alternate universes or perceive U directly, whatever that may mean. At least in the early days of the "drug culture", drugs like LSD were seen as a means of exploring that alternate reality - not just a way of bending the brain out of shape.

Religions also tend to assume that there is a moral universe that exists beyond the world of mere mortals but applies in some way to the moral choices we make. For example, the fate of our souls depends on the moral choices we make. In such a moral universe, the concept of "free will" is an essential attribute of the soul. If we have no free will, the entire idea of merit and reward beyond death (or even in this world) makes no sense. Religious apologists are well aware of this problem - frequently claiming that in a world without God (or their religion), morality cannot exist.

But if we stick to the evidence available, we are forced to conclude that our minds and therefore all of E are happening between our ears and are therefore embedded in U, like the rest of our bodies. There is no other Universe. Mind, like gravity, however mysterious, is a phenomenon within U.

One of the most impressive bits of evidence for this is the structure of the brain. Brain structure heavily contributes to "character" in the sense that lesions, injuries, tumors, and drugs can dramatically alter moral behavior. What we consider to be "moral" choices - the ones that supposedly chart the progress of the soul - are the work of identifiable brain structures.  If you break down "free will" into components, you wind up with faculties (brain structures, processes and systems) that may or may not work as expected. These faculties may fail individually or in combination as a consequence of specific injury to specific brain systems. For moral decisions to take place:

• You need to be aware of the alternatives for action;
• The alternatives need to be emotionally "tagged" - some "feel" better than others - otherwise you don't care;
• You need to access applicable memory and social "rules";
• You need to feel things like disgust, lust, shame, pride, and empathy;
• You need to be able to hold all this in working memory long enough to work out an action;
• You need to be able to act according to your mental "computation" (many people "know" what is right but behave in alarming, self-destructive ways anyway).

Drastic departures from "normal" capabilities in these areas are labeled with morally-tinged "disorders" such as psychopathy or even mild character judgments such as "laziness" or "impulsiveness". We are just beginning to understand the physical roots of these personality patterns. The field of psychological neurology is gradually stripping away our common sense idea that "bad" people are acting out of free choice - making "bad choices". What's left is a view that "normal" people make "normal" choices using "normal" brain structures. There is no room left for the idea that morality is something that exists outside of E (what we experience) and our bodies (part of U). We may need to toss wickedness onto the same scrap heap as demon possession.

Brain structures are stunningly complex in a way that shouts "design". Of course, we put aside the "Santa's Workshop" view of this "design". There is no "designer". But what then? We must say that our brain structures are a result of strong evolutionary pressure.

Our nervous systems extract an astonishing amount of detail from basic sensory information. To cite just one example, there are 20 different types of ganglia in the visual system. These nerve cells extract the "analog" information coming in from the retina. Each type of ganglion "speaks its own digital language" to the deeper structures of the brain. At the moment, we have a vague idea what five of these ganglion types are "talking about". What the others are "saying" remains mysterious. In no case are we in a position to decipher the language that each type speaks.*

There are hundreds of different cell types in the hippocampus - the brain area critical to memory. The complexity of this design is several orders of magnitude beyond anything that has come out of human design efforts. What is motivating this incredible process? It can be nothing but what we call R. The "real world". Our brains are embedded in R and they are a direct consequence of phenomena in R. Specifically, evolutionary "pressure" from events in R have consequences for even subtle differences in the design of our bodies - especially our brains. This applies to the way our brains make "moral" choices. There is no particular need for us to know what these "pressures" are. For example, we have been breathing for millennia before we discovered oxygen.

Evolutionary "pressure" is "adaptive", or "survival of the fittest". But for humans, survival depends on acting together with other humans. Great sections of the brain are specifically devoted to this job, including obvious things like speech but even more sophisticated "circuitry" that computes socially acceptable behavior - that's what we call "morality".

The main business of religion is to help us "compute" our behavior in socially acceptable ways. Religion is the result of many brains "computing" general solutions to the problems of existence, especially existence together with other humans.

We are left with a view of the world and our role in it that departs significantly from virtually all religions, but, at the same time, tells us why we have religions and why there is no particular reason for them to "make sense":

• There is no "soul" apart from the body. Consciousness - and all the mysteries of the self - are created by the brain. The "self" can be disassembled bit by bit or ultimately destroyed by injury to the brain. The fact that we can't "explain" this does not put the phenomenon in a special category. We have no ultimate explanation for anything at all - including gravity.
• "Free will", if it exists at all, is severely constrained by the details of our individual brain structure and health.  Wild departures from "normal" - such as psychopaths - have brain abnormalities not much different from being blind from birth. We must challenge our common-sense idea that others may be regarded as fundamentally "good" or "bad" in some absolute sense. 
• With no "soul" or independent realm that dictates moral choices outside of our minds, the need for anything like "heaven" or "god" vanishes. As Pascal famously noted: "We have no need for that hypothesis".

But does the need for religion itself vanish? Our brains are designed to depend heavily on the input from other brains. To cite a simple example, our courts could not function without laws. Laws could not exist without language and the deep history behind the moral "computations" performed by cultures over the centuries. The fact that different cultures compute different answers to the moral problems presented does not diminish the fact that individuals are not "designed" to make moral choices entirely on their own.

It does seem possible for these insights to inspire something that looks like "morality". For example, perhaps we should back off from our natural tendency to regard people with different moral standards as "evil". Perhaps we should be more skeptical of ideas like deliberation and willfulness in those who offend against our laws. Perhaps we need to re-think our ideas of "justice" entirely - especially when it comes to our systems of punishment and reward that supposedly motivate people to behave in the "right" way. It seems to me that people who accept compassion as a core religious belief are already close to accepting this attitude for simple "scientific" reasons. It is a simple, verifiable fact that E is a creation of the human mind in response to the "real" pressure from R plus our efforts to survive in partnership with others (also playing itself out on a stage in R).

The vast majority of the human race believes or acts "as if" their own cultural standards of morality are absolute and not "invented" by "mere" humans. We want to think that their worldview is not "merely" mythical but in some sense reflecting a special insight into the nature of reality, usually augmented by some kind of "supernatural" (not part of U) history. I don't think it is too much of a leap for such people to accept that their worldview is a special case of "E". Other worldviews - even conflicting worldviews - need to be understood as fundamentally human and not uniquely valid conclusions of the nature of reality. For the individual, morality boils down to what we should do - here and now, in this world. Practical experience tells us that it's quite possible for folks with utterly different worldviews to agree on a wide range of common action.

On the other hand, it should be possible for us to deny "supernatural" justifications for actions that cast others as "evil" - deserving suppression or even death.

It's not too much to ask.

* More on visual system ganglia and the "big picture" posed by the brain here.

The Matrix - Pushing the Metaphor

Many of the "Matrix" ideas can be seen as just a slightly different angle on ideas presented elsewhere in this blog - especially here, where I summarize "progress to date".

Art is a useful species of simulation. It allows us to imagine different worlds using no more hardware than our senses and our brains. The result can go beyond what we usually think of as "metaphor" - even extending into the realms of myth and religion.

The Matrix movie series provides a challenging dramatization of metaphors that are so commonplace that they have become tropes for empty speculation and dead-end philosophy. The movie updates some old ideas in dramatic new ways:

• Many religions, including the "Abrahamic" and Hindu traditions, regard reality as some kind of dream, with the "real", important reality being the realm of the gods. The "soul" is separable from the body and travels on after death into the more important realms of the gods. In such traditions, little attention is paid to the actual details of the "real world". It's Turkmenistan*.
• Certain philosophies, most notably "idealism", claim that the there is nothing but our experience - the "real world" is either non-existent or unknowable. This comes close to how I regard the "matrix" to work, but, in my view, the matrix is built on the real world and assumes the existence of the real world.
• Antonio Damasio teaches that complex animals, such as mammals, "model" the real world by means of states of their central nervous system. However, somehow the word "model" doesn't convey the fullness of our experience - how totally comprehensive and all-embracing these models can be. We live inside the models.
• In his best-selling novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig presents the concept that a motorcycle, in spite of being made of hard physical metal, is really an idea. While Pirsig later claimed that the novel has nothing to do with either Zen or Motorcycles, his motorcycle-as-idea formed the basis of what was "Zen" for me and allowed my concept of the "Matrix" to encompass more than "mere" mental phenomena. All "artificial" objects are also ideas and therefore part of the "matrix" for both their creators and users.
• In the Knowledge Illusion, Sloman shows how the world surrounding us and the world of our ideas is really constructed by society. Our own contribution to our thoughts is easy to overestimate (the illusion). Our ability to navigate the physical world is the result of an illusion that we know more than we actually do - actual knowledge coming, for example, from the designer and builder of the car we thoughtlessly drive around.
• In Thinking Fast and Slow, one of the most influential books of the 20th century, Kahneman shows how we go through life on auto-pilot most of the time, living in a sea of assumptions that are questioned only when we run up against surprising challenges. This calls to mind the throngs of people in the matrix, who go about their lives without a thought about what is really going on (in this case, they are living in a computer simulation).

All this combines to produce my vision of the "matrix" as being more than a product of the individual mind and more than something "merely" mental. Like any good work of art, it invites us to go beyond the obvious and ask for deeper connections. The matrix is what Hoffstader would call an "Essential" metaphor. We are invited to take the "red pill" to learn our true nature. Within the constraints of movie fiction, our "true nature" is something simple, dramatic and (let's face it) implausible. Outside of fiction, discovery of our "true nature" is perhaps the most important quest of all.

* Turkmenistan is my short-hand for aspects of the world that you know are real but, other than that, we know little about them and you are not overly curious to know more.

Matrix Revisited

good piece. Sooooooooooo, do we build our own matrix, or is built by others and the way they interact with us? Is this a simulation or is it and illusion? ...and how do we when our matrix comes in touch with reality. Is the matrix our physical body or only partly (your reference to surgery while awake) How does the illusion relate to our spirituality? Stuff for another blog. 

1. We build our own matrix with the constant help of others - mostly indirect. Through language and the man-made environment, for example. A city may be regarded as a matrix. It exists through wide agreement on what it is, why it exists, the rules it enforces (walls, laws, roads). The city is called into existence because we all agree on what it means. To see this, imagine what a city is to, say, an e-coli bacterium or a crow.

2. It's a simulation that employs illusions sometimes. For example, we have the illusion that our eyes look out on the world constantly and smoothly. The brain allows us to miss blinking and saccades (rapid, constant jerky eye movements). It's a simulation in the sense that it models certain relevant aspects of reality fairly accurately at the scale required.

3. For mammals, the simulation is accomplished by the central nervous system and is implemented through states of that system. Humans extend this by means of communicating nervous systems and constructions in physical reality that convey "meaning", such as roads and doors.

4. Spiritual "reality", including entities like God and angels, are furnished in the matrix of some individuals and cultures. For such individuals, the "reality" of such entities is not questioned but is held at arm's length, such as one's belief in a country called Turkmenistan. It's real, "out there" but little is known about the details.

The Matrix

The Matrix is one of the most successful, popular and lucrative movie franchises of all time.  I will assume the reader has watched at least some of the shows in this series, perhaps more than once.

Quite apart from its entertainment value, the Matrix has provided a new "meme" for bar room philosophy: the idea that reality itself is a kind of "matrix" - that we are all living in a simulation. This has struck me as a rather stupid idea for a long time and I have occasionally bent my "back of the napkin" analysis tools to showing how ridiculous it is.

But it's true. We are living in a simulation. Realizing this can be a big leap forward in our quest to understand ourselves and the universe we inhabit.

How can this be true? Well, quite simply. Everything we experience is presented to our minds due to an amazingly complex set of sensations and brain processes. We never experience reality directly. We are born, live and die inside the simulated universe of our minds. Fortunately, the simulation is accurate enough so that we stand a good chance of survival while never knowing exactly what the world looks like.

All this is easy to see. But there's more.

Our minds don't construct the matrix independently. In fact, the matrix is constructed with a lot of help from the people around us and, of course, extensive personal experience with the actual universe. Contrary to what the "idealist" says, reality needs to be taken seriously, even if we have no direct knowledge of it. Without the "real world", the matrix world of the mind does not exist.

So it is, that we live in a shared matrix in an ultimately unknowable "real world". Many aspects of this matrix are critically important to us (inside the matrix) even though they do not correspond to anything in the "real world". Most prominent of these are God, language, money and the overcoat of human values that we paint over everything inside the matrix.

Although we are trapped inside the matrix, we sometimes get a glimpse of "reality" that is a shocking reminder of how we wrap ourselves comfortably in the illusions of the matrix.

The Author's Brain While Writing This

On several occasions, I have been awake during medical procedures that unmistakably show the shocking physical reality of what I think of as "me". I have Xrays and Cat scans on file of my spine and knee. This week I underwent an ablation surgery on my heart, which reminded me that this little lump of muscle is real - always behind the scenes waiting to end me at any time.

I read quite a bit about my "microbiome", the community in my gut that makes up the majority of cells in my body and mysteriously influences my health in a myriad of unknown ways.

Actual Photo of My MicroBiome

Thinking of the world we live in as a "matrix" simulation opens the door to a new way of thinking of ourselves and our place in the universe. We all live in our own personal matrix and that matrix is shared with different sets of people. That's the nature of being human. Something that is absolutely real in one person's matrix can be an illusion or completely absent in another. We always need to be aware of the fact that none of us has the option of living outside the matrix. But we do have the option to appreciate and respect the world that others live in, along with perhaps the humility to always be aware that our own matrix is not the real world. It cannot be.