Are You an Avatar?: Discover Simulism: Another Image of the World.

By Alain Rifat

Vertiginous! Reading this book will immerse you in a reality you could never have imagined! The world you know, the world your instincts understand, the image of the world your life experiences and perceptions have built up... will no longer be the same!
Taking seriously the very weird discoveries of modern physics and psychology leads to a new image of the world so different from the one we have, that disturbing, incomprehensible observations, such as strange psychic faculties like telepathic communication, clairvoyance... or testimonies incompatible with the world you know, such as the detection of aerial devices that defy the laws of physics, or strange but humanoid entities that transmit messages to us... become possible!
Simulism is a new image of the world that provides a framework in which your identity turns out to be fundamentally different from the one you thought was yours until now. But it will be immensely richer than the old one... It will allow you to perceive matter, space and time in very unexpected ways! But for this to happen, you need to have the courage to question yourself completely, to be ready to disappear to be reborn, in a sense. To be capable of completely transforming what you thought was real!
If you're looking to understand the world, then immerse yourself in Simulism! You're in for a treat. But beware! You'll also be destabilized. All your points of reference will be shaken!
If you don't want to change your paradigm, your image of the world and of yourself... then don't read this book!
The author is a scientist interested in the philosophy of science, biology, physics, and computer science.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alain Rifat
• Release date: Oct 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215987964

Alain Rifat

I love Science! Language and the scientific methodology are maybe the most impressive creations of our species and are part of humankind's specificity. We have an innate need to understand the world in which we are born and the scientific way is particularly powerful since it incites us to build an image, a model of the world we live in. And science invites us to continuously verify the relevance of our world's image by looking for evidence, usually through analysis, experiments and observations.To be amazed; to ask oneself questions; to imagine answers and to put them to test... To build one's own rational conviction, the feeling to understand something fundamental about our world. This procedure seems to us so natural today that we tend to forget that Science is young; a little less than four centuries only!Science was created by philosophers who were looking for objective and verifiable knowledge. But unfortunately sometime the open-mindedness of its creators is lost; conservative and critical mind takes its place and Science can become as dogmatic as a Religion! Yet God knows that she doesn't deserve such a fate!I followed a scientific path, guided by an interest about the nature of the world and life. I studied Biology then graduated in Molecular Biology and finished a phD in Molecular Genetics. I tried to follow the discoveries in Cosmology and Quantum Physics and to appreciate Life through space and time; that is to say Life's history: evolution; and its fabulous entanglement in an impressive Biosphere: ecology.My path led me to discover the psychic world's strangeness: intuitions, premonitions, transpersonal communication... that aren't a priori understandable through the common image of the world: the common paradigm which is Physicalism. This paradigm states that only matter is real and builds the world.This paradigm arose mainly in the 19th century. But it still lags today even if modern Physics has shown since the beginning of the 20th century, that what we call real, hasn't the properties we currently attribute to reality! The new paradigm we have to build nowadays could very well unveil a reality closer to what we think belongs to a spiritual realm than to a material one only!I tried to follow the scientific methodology to build a rational conviction. And today I'm convinced that consciousness can evolve outside the space and time restrictions that are the ones in which our body lives. Physicalism just can't explain what consciousness is able to do!We're on the cusp of a new Renaissance that should enlarge our perspectives and bridge Science and Spirituality. It's with this view that we had the idea of this book: an easy to read detective novel that plays with some reflexions on the way to a new paradigm. One that should give us a new world's image, best adapted to modern science's and psychophysics' discoveries.

Book preview

WOULD YOU BE AN AVATAR?

Discovering SIMULISM; another image of the world

By Alain Rifat

DocuFiction: Paradigm, Image of the World, Philosophy of Science, Virtual Reality, Simulation

Copyright © 2023, Alain Rifat

Smashwords Edition


 Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite eBook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the authors.

CONTENTS

WHAT IS SIMULISM?

A : IS THE WORLD AS REAL AS IT SEEMS?

B : ANOMALIES AND SIMULISM

B1 : WHAT IS MATTER ?

B2 : IS THE UNIVERSE DIGITAL ?

B3 : 1922 : SCIENCE RE-ENCHANTS THE WORLD

B4 : THE STRANGENESS OF INDISCERNABILITY.

B5 : THE STRANGENESS OF RELATIVITY

B6 : THE NATURE OF LIGHT

B7 : THE STRANGENESS OF ENTANGLEMENT

B8 : THE UNIVERSE IS STRANGELY BIOCOMPATIBLE

C : WHAT IF THE WORLD WERE VIRTUAL... WHAT WOULD THE IMPLICATIONS BE?

C1 : WHAT IS A REAL OBJECT ?

C2 : SIMULATION AND PROGRAM BUGS

A BUG IN THE PROGAM

C3 : DO WE LIVE IN A VIRTUAL WORLD.

C4 : SYNCHRONICITY AND MANIPULATION

C5 : SYNCHRONICITY AND JOKER

C6 : PUPPETRY

C7 : A GREAT GAME

C8 : RE-ENCHANTING CONSCIOUSNESS

C9 : VIRTUAL... SO THEN?

A DESIRE TO DEEPEN THE SUBJECT?

PUBLICATIONS.

WHAT IS SIMULISM?

A: IS THE WORLD AS REAL AS IT SEEMS?

With the joystick firmly planted between your palms, your thumbs automatically react to your avatar's environment based on your past gaming experience. You enjoy this moment of relaxation; your thoughts are free to wander until... Shock! Mario no longer obeys your commands. He turns to face you and says: "What's this? ... You're abandoning me! Why are you giving me all these falls today? What have I done to deserve such a fate?"

Flabbergasted, your critical mind has given way... you hear yourself reply, What kind of joke is this?!

Never had anything like this happened to you; you were in control; your avatar, your virtual double, was entirely passive, under your orders; a pure extension of the activity of your thumbs. Your critical mind comes back to life, and you begin to enjoy the facetiousness imagined by the game's programmer. "Well done, programmer! Very nice!"

"No! It's Mario, not Programmer! You know... your faithful disciple. I've always obeyed you; why abandon me now?"

Shock! Astonishment! Perplexity... then a new hypothesis: the programmer is using artificial intelligence (AI) to imitate conscious behavior. Your screen's built-in camera and microphone are active without your knowledge, picking up information that the AI can use in the game program. Amazing! This game really goes further than you thought! Your avatar behaves as if it were aware of its identity, its environment, and its place in the adventure! Even of your presence and power over it! You know that AI has gone from strength to strength in recent years, but... how can you program something that resembles artificial consciousness?! Is that even possible?

To find out, we'd need to agree on the nature of consciousness, which is far from being the case.

Let's proceed step by step. To be conscious, your avatar would have to refer to a rich and complex personality that it would perceive as its own, in the same way as you are conscious of yourself. But recently developed deep learning procedures mimic your own way of learning about the world. Could they build an artificial consciousness in the same way as yours has been built over time?

CONSCIOUSNESS AND WORLD IMAGE

Your instincts, inherited from your ancestors through their confrontations with the world, plus your own experiences throughout your life, create an image of the inner and outer world that is part of your consciousness. Without realizing it, you continually refer to this image of yourself and your environment to analyze your perceptions, situate yourself in the world and find meaning in it. If your avatar were conscious, it would benefit from faculties that would provide it with a kind of understanding of its virtual world akin to that which you construct from your instincts and experiences. AI makes this possible. Hasn't the machine beaten the human at chess and even Go, which we thought was impossible?

AI lets you imagine a self-learning program that would endow your avatar with a rich set of routines enabling him to perceive and then react appropriately to the objects that make up his world and the experiences he goes through. You can imagine a program powerful enough to build a virtual avatar capable of perceiving its virtual environment and itself in a way similar to your experience of the world and of yourself. Today, AI seems to go beyond simple automatic reactions to perceptions. Its analyses incorporate so many parameters and its reactions are so complex that it seems to create a kind of individual, unpredictable artificial personality that goes far beyond what the programmer can predict. The programmer is often unable to understand how the AI program he has created comes up with the results he discovers! He may be surprised by the unexpected prowess of the program he has written! A bit like you when an idea emerges from your subconscious; where does it really come from?

Let's assume that all this has been achieved; your avatar discovers and learns about the virtual world in which it evolves. It builds up an image, a reference that helps it to situate and perceive itself in its own virtual reality. It should seem as real to him as the one in which you evolve seems real to you. But could you really believe that your avatar is truly aware of his environment and himself? It's impossible to know, since this is a subjective faculty; you'll never be able to get inside your avatar's head to perceive whether he's as self-aware as you are! You can only imagine challenges to present to your avatar to try and defeat it. But what if the programmer is highly skilled?

And can emotions be programmed? They're almost as subjective as thoughts, so it's impossible to know whether they're real emotions or just behaviors that mimic them!

At this point in your thinking, you're at a loss; artificial consciousness no longer seems as unimaginable as it did before the development of computers and AI. You can never be quite sure that your avatar is not conscious, but merely imitating what, until now, seems to belong only to your species.

THE WORLD IN IMAGE

Your self-image is called into question. Until now, you were convinced that only humans are truly aware of themselves, of their presence in a complex world that they learn to discover, understand, exploit, and modify... This certainty is part of your image of the world: this great library of knowledge progressively acquired from an early age. Thanks to it, you understand your world better and better, and you use it to integrate into it as safely and comfortably as possible. Once acquired, it's very difficult to change; it's truly an integral part of your personality. Questioning it is even more disturbing because you know instinctively that it is essential to your survival.

This questioning was what Galileo asked of his interlocutors. He was trying to persuade them that their image of the world was wrong because their perceptions were misleading them. The Earth is not the center of the universe, but it does revolve around the Sun, despite our perception to the contrary. Today, we've learned that our Sun is just one of hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy. That the universe contains billions of galaxies like our own. That many stars are accompanied by planets, some with properties favorable to the development of life as we know it on Earth... It would be astonishing not to discover exotic life elsewhere in the universe, then intelligences... And consciences?!

Our image of the world and of ourselves has a history that continues to broaden our perspectives. Today, we are discovering the rich complexity of the world, which puts into perspective the importance we attach to our own identity. The evolution of our knowledge of the universe and its history, of our nature in relation to other species, and the prodigious development of information technology and its applications, have led certain philosophers to question our certainties. Rather like Galileo in his day, they're wondering whether reality really is as we perceive it.

In particular, they rely on the discoveries of modern physics. These have turned physicists on their head to such an extent that they've become dualistic, so to speak. At work, they apply their discoveries with the success you enjoy every day when using electronics and computer applications. But, like you, they continue to behave in everyday life as if our image of the world, inherited from pre-1900 science, were still valid.

It's true that it's still useful on your scale. It's only if you were interested in the infinitely small, the infinitely large or even extreme speeds, that your image of the world would no longer be adequate. Physicists are proposing new ones, but they are so disturbing that no consensus has yet been reached, even though the first discoveries revolutionized physics over a century ago.

But what if we turned the argument on its head? If your consciousness were artificial, could you see it?

ARE YOU REAL?

This is a pertinent question, because some researchers are suggesting that our universe could be virtual, even though it seems so real to us that this mere suggestion often results in automatic rejection, such incredulity that the idea is immediately dismissed without analysis. How can anyone suggest such an absurd hypothesis?

You take the suggestion as a joke or a provocation. Yet, if you make the effort to explore it a little, you discover that it has been elaborated and suggests a new image of the world, a new paradigm: that framework within which our knowledge acquires meaning by associating it with each other.

This new paradigm even has a name: Simulism, designed to challenge the Materialism inherited from the knowledge acquired by science between the 17th and the end of the 19th centuries. This is because scientific discoveries since 1900 have been increasingly challenging the certainties acquired earlier. Despite scientists' best efforts, the materialist paradigm is losing its evidence; matter is no longer what it has always seemed:

"Whatever the nature of matter, it is not made of matter!" ironizes physicist Hans Peter Dürr.

The impressive research carried out to describe the properties of matter has produced a wealth of results, some of which have revolutionized our technologies and economies, creating the sciences of the atom and the exploitation of energy, electronics, and computing. This modern physics is the richest and most precise that physicists have been able to build since Galileo invented physics! But the theories and models that attempt to understand and make sense of these discoveries have been obliged to progressively, and with great regret, abandon the certainties you hold about the nature of reality, essentially derived from the perception you have of it through your body. Just as we have had to abandon our image of the Earth as the center of the world, since our perception tells us that it is the Sun that revolves around it, scientists have had to admit that matter is not what we perceive it to be. Now we have to accept that matter is what we discover, not what we perceive. In a way, we must repeat the effort made by Galileo's interlocutors.

Everything that seems real to us is made up of things that we cannot call real. Niels Bohr: physicist.

Our perception of what we consider real misleads us. The physicist takes note: objects that seem real to us - that seem to have individuality, characteristics of their own and independent of us - aren't so!

A MATHEMATICAL UNIVERSE

Quantum physics was born in 1900, followed by Relativity five years later. To say that both revolutionized our understanding of the universe would be an understatement. We discovered that the universe has a history, whereas we thought it was identical to itself from all eternity. We discovered that the nature of matter is closer to mathematics than to our perception of it. As far as physics is concerned, matter is made up of vacuum and energy - not exactly what we perceive! We've discovered that the universe isn't really made up of concrete, independent objects with individual properties - in other words, real objects. Today, these discoveries are so numerous, and are increasingly consolidated despite major efforts to defeat them, that we need to rethink our image of the world as made up of matter and independent objects. Materialism and Realism must be questioned and rethought.

The universe we've been discovering for over a century resembles a mathematical construction rather than a machine. Simulism draws radical conclusions from this: the universe becomes mathematical!

A mathematical universe is a virtual, computerized universe. Computing becomes a relevant means of analyzing what we discover about its properties. Matter and energy become expressions of mathematical information underlying perceived reality and are no longer the primordial foundations of reality as they were in the materialistic worldview. Matter and energy become the result of calculations processed in a reality more fundamental than the one we perceive, and which gives rise to them. A bit like what happens in our computers when they construct a virtual reality calculated according to the simulation program, then display the results on a screen or in the more elaborate form of a hologram, for example. Matter and energy, which we perceive as the foundations of reality, become holograms displaying the results of calculations made in a reality more fundamental than the reality perceived by our senses.

The differences we discover between the fundamental nature of the universe and what we perceive of it with our senses would be akin to the difference in nature between a computer and the program it calculates, on the one hand, and the result of these calculations, on the other. The two worlds - that of the calculations and that of the results displayed - are highly correlated but are completely different in nature! Information becomes fundamental, as it is the source of the object or energy we perceive. The fundamental characteristics of objects become the result of interactions between information and are no longer the direct result of interactions between matter and energy.

Like other researchers, I'm trying to formulate the central questions one after the other (...) taking as my working hypothesis the most effective that has survived this winnowing: It from Bit.

It from Bit symbolizes the idea that (...) all things physical arise from information theory and that this is a participatory universe.

Physics gives rise to observer participation; observer participation gives rise to information; and information gives rise to physics. John Wheeler: physicist.

ARE YOU VIRTUAL?

The situation is such that the unthinkable becomes relevant! What if we ourselves were virtual? If the universe is virtual, we can't escape it, of course! And if we were avatars, would we be able to discover it, to convince ourselves of it?

These questions are developed below by presenting the astonishing discoveries of physics and their interpretation within the framework of Simulism. Discoveries that seem absurd from a materialistic point of view can be much more easily understood if what you perceive as material and real are merely symbols of purely mathematical entities. The world would not be made up of real objects, but of virtual images only: the result of computer calculations made in a kind of simulation program. An illusion of sorts, as Eastern philosophies (especially Hinduism and Buddhism) have suggested for millennia.

"Surely, one day, we can believe, we'll grasp the