Time spent reading this "stream of consciousness" text file, will hopefully
free you from many of the psychological burdens we humans carry around with
us, and at the same time free your mind to think in ways, heretofore reserved
for an elite band of philosophers and other mental giants.

    We are of course temporary:

    Our twentieth century American lifestyle hasn't the time to consider
this fact, we therefore spare no effort to suppress this reality from our
consciousness.  To a modern American, death is little more than a myth.
Religion tends to make excuses for this deficit...  You're not going to die,
you're just going to the promised land.  To understand death, you have to
first admit to yourself that it exists, that is, it is and end of life.  More
importantly that your life will end.  Once this becomes truly understood, the
world starts looking pretty silly.  We see war on the news.  Soldiers dyeing
for their country.  They obviously haven't thought this death thing out.  Any
potential to even observe the outcome of the war, has been erased by dying.

    Once you come to grips with the notion that you won't last forever, you
can begin to realistically live your life.  Time could be seen by some as an
enemy.  It is time after all that moves us in the direction of our end.  But
without time we would all be frozen, unable to perceive the world around us.
What most of us fail to realize is that we all control the passage of time.
Time is not necessarily an enemy, we can't be awake, or aware without it, yet
we must remain diligent, at controlling how quickly it is allowed to pass us
by.

    I sense you are skeptical we have any control over it.  I ask you to think
back to the time you were a child, days took an eternity to pass.  You could
mistakenly pass this off as boredom, brought on by the fact that a child has
less control of his or her life.  What is really causing this effect, is the
lack of the rich reservoir of life's experiences we as adults have at our
disposal to draw on to perceive all that is around us.  If not for these we
would be awe struck by the simplest of things, and five minutes would seem
like an hour.  Part of the lure of drugs such as Marijuana and Peyote is the
time dilation, effect.  Even at low dosages time stretches out, you are awe
struck by all around you, it's not that you lose the rich reservoir of life's
experiences that an adult has, they are simply less relevant than sensory
input.  The phrase "Stop and smell the Roses" was never more apropos.  More
intense psychedelics allow you to groom the tapestry of life's experiences,
Often you reassign a clearer meaning to these experiences.  For some people
the entire foundation of life's meaning is revised, these people are said to
have undergone the so called religious experience.

    Many religions tap into this, by promising to fill the very human need
of allowing all of ones accumulated experiences to not be wasted in the
certainty of death, by pretending that somehow it "will" be avoided.  Science
offers us the tenuous notion that maybe one day medicine will extend life to
such a point that we will do everything we ever wanted to do, and death when
it comes will be more acceptable, or perhaps avoidable entirely.  This may
indeed be so, but it will likely be acquired only at great cost, probably
available to only the privileged few, and would require drastic changes
in our propensity to procreate, one of the strongest drives we as humans
ever experience.

    Science fiction has given us a popularized view of
"Collective Consciousness" one stylized example is "The Borg" from "Star Trek"
in most cases these are Consciousness Collections that are malevolent, or
dictatorial in nature.  While they make good entertainment, I believe they do
not represent any likely evolutional coarse that emotionally complex
intelligent beings would take.  For one thing it is unlikely the shallow
nature portrayed by "The Borg" example, would entice human beings to exchange
their corporeal existence, with some unfeeling networked storage medium.

    A more likely coarse is one in which computers develop true self aware
intelligence, largely modeled on the only model available, that of ourselves.
Among things we already understand about the brain by comparing the relative
size of brains, versus their effectiveness, is the importance of the dreaming
mechanism.  Many researchers of artificial intelligence recognize the
importance the dreaming process, as vital to any effort in artificial
intelligence.  I do not believe humans will become Cyborgs, rather, at some
point they will be invited to share an existence with the computer.
No coercion will be necessary, the temporary, and frail nature of the
corporeal human body, will necessitate this change.  At first people will
start using the facility to park unimportant mental traffic, to free it to
engage more useful pursuits.  These human memories, that are placed in the
computer, are not simply records.  They are "living" human experiences, that
is, they are cognizant, and active.  They are running programs, evolving
moment to moment, they are fluid, and dynamic.  Just as human memories are
malleable, so are these.  To be sure genetic engineering will play an
important part in the human brain to computer interface, something like the
fabrication of a new brain organ; a kind of interface cortex, an extension of
the grey matter, that once properly mastered would be as natural as sight, or
hearing, and speech to a person equipped with an electronic implant from
birth.

    When people who've "parked" unimportant experiences on the computer dream,
they will discover that their dreams, include those experiences that were
"parked".  At that moment they will realize that the computer is an extension
of their own consciousness, and they will bit by bit trust more and more.
At some point the computer human symbiosis will be so complete that more of
life's experiences will be living memory in the computer, than in the
corporeal human body.  At some point the effort of maintaining the frail
corporeal human body will become such a burden, they will willingly elect to
shed their human body.  This is death only for the corporeal human body, NOT
for the accumulated lifelong experiences.  Those for the first time in human
history are immortal.  That is immortal in the sense that as long as the
computer remains turned on the individuals "inside" live.  They also provide a
valuable resource that is something like education.  Children growing up in
this age will have the option of acquiring their schooling effortlessly, and
instantly, by assimilation.  Think of the pressure we apply on our children to
succeed today, imagine what it would be like in an age when, all the child had
to do was, accept an implant, and presto, he or she has the option of
acquiring a full college education, with a lifetime, some one hundred plus
years, of practical experience to back it up, simply by "willing" the
acquisition of the knowledge.  But wait there's more, much more.  Every being
that has ever lived, ever loved, and all the other en-devours we as human
beings endure, are there for the taking.  If you think that this would all be
too much, remember that there is nothing to stop one from "parking" memories
as fast as they are acquired...   Nothing that is except, that if you engage
in behavior of this type, to the exclusion of all else, you betray your
special capability.  You in effect become a slave to the memories of others.
Electronic systems would respond to thought, you simply will the door open
and it opens.  You communicate to others by telepathy, albeit the message is
sent through electronic switching systems to the other persons brain via
their implant.  Love would be kind of interesting, you could tickle your
mates sexy button from a place heretofore unreachable, in-fact a good lover
could provide delights unattainable, and unimaginable by current standards.
The art of love itself, is learned from others, by willing the acquisition
of that knowledge, so everyone so inclined, is an excellent lover.  There are
no true secrets.  In our limited scope, this would seem problematic, but this
is a universal trait of the human condition in such a world.  Evil would be
totally unknown, it simply can't happen, because everyone knows your deepest
intentions, and it is in their interest to shower an evil doer with so much
love they are unable to carry out an evil deed.  In such a world life
revolves around this kind of connectivity, living without the implant would
be unthinkable.

    For all we know this sort of thing may have already happened, and we are
by our own deliberate design, made unaware of it.  The name of this file
is TIME.TXT and the subject here is time and our perception of it.  In the
cognitive world I've just described in the previous paragraph, a situation
would arise at some point, where so many "life cognitive collections" would be
living inside cyberspace that the number of actual living beings would over
time become small by comparison.  I digress;  There is a popular
misconception that there are more people alive today than have ever lived
throughout history.  This is easily disproved with simple math...   You can
easily run the numbers in your head!  The reason is that not only is the
reverse true, but it is massively, and overwhelmingly true, and it does not
take very many generations for this to happen, either.  If you doubt me I
encourage you to run the numbers...  You'll be amazed...  I was.
Back to the point, in the cognitive world I referred to earlier, the situation
would arise, given time, where so many "life cognitive collections" would be
living inside cyberspace that the number of actual living beings would indeed
be small by comparison.  The earth, "if it really exists at all" wouldn't
support vastly larger numbers of human population.  In this day in age this
should be obvious.  If you were a life cognitive entity living only in
cyberspace you would have to work very hard, to befriend one of those real
life humans out there in the real world, to adopt even part of your
consciousness, simply because of the vast numbers of people like you, and the
very limited number of real human beings.  I would go so far as to say it
would be rather more likely that the real human you chose would be struck by
lightning before you ever got the chance.  So faced with such insurmountable
odds, what would you, and others like you do?  The answer, simulate!

    If you can't make more people, maybe you can just simulate them.  Oh my
goodness, what about the simulations, do they acquire the same rights and
privileges as "life cognitive entities" ?...  Bad Idea!  If they were allowed
to spawn entry into the "Galactic life cognitive collection" one would spawn
two, two would spawn four, etc.  This is particularly problematic because time
does not exist for these individuals in the same way it does for standard
"life cognitive entities" the reason is that since they are simulations, there
is no need to wait for biological life processes to take place, thus their
whole life is lived out to it's conclusion in "to mix a metaphor" the blink of
an eye.  The simulation doesn't experience any thing unusual about time,
because time itself is being faithfully simulated for the benefit of the
simulated being.  If the simulations were allowed to acquire the same rights
and privileges as "life cognitive entities" the galactic computer no matter
how big, is destine to overload itself, this fact is guaranteed.  Recursion
would unavoidably, inevitably, result in the system committing computer
suicide.  Any system as developed as the one we are speaking of here, would
obviously prevent this kind of thing, in a fit of self-preservation.
The rules for starting such a simulation by a life cognitive entity would
probably fall along the lines of...  You may start only one life at a time.
You may participate in the life to any degree you wish, however you are warned
that the life you run will be very unhappy if it is allowed to see that it is
only a simulation, and therefore this practice is discouraged.  You may run a
life in conjunction with other lives being run, and you may participate in the
simulation with other life cognitive entity's lives, and this may be
prearranged, I.E. You and your spousal unit, can meet-up in simulation, have
kids, mortgages, and retire together, in any time period that ever existed or
didn't exist, although that program is a bit more difficult to write, and
compile.  The option would be open for, a kind of hands off, I.E. let the
simulation run, but maybe only look in on it occasionally.  Which brings us to
the inevitable question what would it be like to live out your life as a
simulation?

    First off...  You would have no way of detecting that you are only a
simulation.  Huh?  What does that mean?  I'll give you an example.  Let say
you are a simulation.  Your senses are simulated, perfectly.  Your cognitive
faculties are simulated perfectly.  The world around you, indeed reality
itself, is simulated perfectly.  Let's say you are in a dimly lit room.  You
walk over to the switch plate on the wall.  The sound of your own foot steps
is part of this perfect simulation.  As you approach the wall plate and you
reach out with your arm, hand, and finger, you vaguely see your arm, hand, and
finger come to rest on the plastic lever of the light switch.  All of this
visual imagery is just part of the simulation, right down to feeling your
finger touch the plastic lever.  As you press upward on the lever, the
simulation allows you to feel the ever familiar increasing spring tension,
hear the clicking sound when the lever jumps past the threshold, and the loss
of finger contact is felt, as the simulated switch leaves your finger.  The
simulation then filters light in through the window, increasing illumination
somewhat, but the illumination you perceive is only part of the simulation.
Suddenly you realize you flipped "on" the switch to the porch light, and not
the ceiling lamp you intended to turn on.  As you make corrective actions the
simulation provides you with everything you expect.  If you do anything as a
simulation that the Galactic computer has a problem with, you have no clue.
The reason is that because the computer is not only simulating reality for
you, including the passage of time, it is also simulating your cognitive
processes as well.  If something went amiss, you would never know!

    OK...  Now get ready for a shock.  How do you know that you're not just
a simulation?  There is really no way for you to tell.  All of your life's
experiences are based on things you have felt through your senses.  But those
could be simply simulated sensations.  Ending your life prematurely does
nothing to test whither you are actually alive living in a real reality or not
because you have no guarantee you will be able, or even willing to tell what
you find out, once you are on the other side!

    I imagine if you've never encountered this concept before it is causing
you think about it.  What does it all mean.  Well for one thing all
indications, and observations, we as people, simulated or otherwise,
experience, are consistent.  For most of us, unless we really think about it
consistency, is accepted as reality.  As I have pointed out you cannot safely
make the leap that just because physical laws remain consistent from one day
to the next, that you are living in any real physical reality.  Its even worse
than that, human memory is malleable.  It changes from one day to the next,
one year to the next, etc.  How else can you explain an experience you've
shared with someone and they have a completely different account of the event.
Ok so maybe they were lying, but how can a diary lie?  The point is we filter
things that we choose to remember.  Our memory is flawed, but our
understanding is less flawed.  Understanding is, if it used with any
regularity, is reinforced by printed documentation, or handwritten notes.
Understanding is our perception of how the world around us works.
If something fails to make sense, and it is something we use frequently, we
challenge our understanding of it, making the necessary revisions to allow for
the anomaly, thus understanding is an ongoing learning process.  The more
careful the process of documentation, the less flawed.  Science is like
this.  Once the observation is sufficiently understood, an experiment is setup
to verify the underlying physics, and that experiment performed, documented,
and published.  That experiment when performed again does tend to produce the
same results.  In those few instances where it fails to produce the same
results, further research finds the flaw in the understanding and ultimately
adds to the foundation of scientific knowledge, the missing details.  On those
rare occasions where whole branches of science are seemingly undone, once
placed into perspective, it is obvious to anyone that the underlying physics
are not what changed, only our understanding of it.  If we are living in a
simulation, these observations are consistent.  They are consistent through
time, from one culture to another, and in different geographical locations,
not just here on earth, but in space as well, and cultures dating back to
ancient times were using principles of the same underlying physics we use
today, though they may not have fully grasp many of the concepts.  If we are
indeed only living in a simulation, it is a damned good one.  However it is
also true that if we are living in a simulation, it by necessity has to be a
good one.  Anything less and we would have proof.

    Reality is our own invention.  When a child first opens it eyes, ears,
and most importantly it's mind, it sets about to create reality.  It does this
by reverse engineering the world around it.  It is running a pattern match
algorithm, relating cause and effect.  Animals do this too, and contrary to
some closed minded people's opinion, animals are intelligent, and not very far
behind us either, as you will come to realize.  A child will throw the bowl
of oatmeal onto the floor, and shout with glee, not just once, but repeatedly.
What is going on here...  Well it could be that gravity, and it's interaction
with viscous liquids must be understood.  If one of the times a child does
this, and something appears to defy his/her understanding of it, there is an
insatiable desire to repeat the experiment, much to the chagrin of the parent.
Our understanding of the world around us is built in layers of observed
patterns, matched and correlated to identify cause and effect.  If you want
a child that lacks any spark of creativity, inter-fear with this process.
Experiments have been setup to create a micro world where cause and effect
were not allowed to operate, during the critical early development of animals.
They end up unable to function.  One experiment I'm aware of took the opposite
tact, they continuously changed the rules of cause and effect, with respect to
the manner by which a chicken was allowed to acquire food.  What they ended up
with was a chicken that performed an almost ritual dance, when it was hungry.
We do indeed invent our own reality, but it is a reality that is often tainted
by the whims of our elders, and they too suffered the same fate.  This is how
ritual, and unwarranted belief systems endure.

    You cannot prove or disprove reality.  All it takes to get a religion
started is for someone to recognize this fact and exploit it.  Once a religion
takes hold, it gains legions of followers, and a select few who profit on
their, very human needs.  If I came up with a cure for all disease tomorrow
people would hand-over all of their possessions for the cure.  If I were a con
artist and I dreamed up a scheme where you had to die to enter the afterlife,
I would rest assured nobody would disprove my claim.  Since you cannot prove
or disprove reality, only observe that it is consistent, what can you do with
it.  Well for starters, you can endeavor to understand as much of it as it's
consistency allows us to repeat-ably test.  Cause and effect do seem to be
operational, even if we are in some other reality, that we are unaware of.
If we are in some other reality, it doesn't matter, because that reality if
it exists, and if we are in it, is not what we are being presented with.
Here and now, is reality, as far as we humans can tell.  You can speculate
about other realities, heaven, hell, or what ever, but they are just that...
Speculations of what might be!  All the while you are wasting valuable TIME!

    For all of the speculations put forward by the religions of the world my
contention that we are just living in simulation, has some very compelling
rational.  It goes like this, if we are living in simulation there is no real
need for us to have actually had any history.  Rather those memories of our
ancestors, and all of recorded history are simply planted in the simulation
before it was started.  We hit the ground running, so to speak...  I digress;
Imagine someone is heading home on the freeway after a long hard day at work.
In his mind he's full of anticipation of the moment he walks through the door
and greets his lovely wife.  Unbeknown to him, there is an invisible alien
space craft hovering over head collecting data on him, and his mind is being
recorded.  The aliens are very interested in this individual because he is
pivotal in the future of the human race.  They know he is about to have a
fatal accident, that will ultimately result in the end of the human race.
They cannot stop the accident, because to do so would alter time so badly
that forecasting the future accurately would be impossible for many years to
come.  They can't prevent the accident, but they can replace him a few
seconds later.  They have on board their craft a genetic duplicate.  This
duplicate is a cell for cell replica, and his car is also duplicated.  Up to
the moment of impact they are recording his mental activity, and copying it
into the replica.  He is of-coarse killed, but moments later when freeway
traffic is at a point where no one will see what they do, the duplicate car
is started, the duplicate copy of his flesh has it's life processes activated.
The car is lowered to the street level by tractor beam, and it is accelerated
as it hits the ground, and the now living body is given the final signal to
awaken in the driver seat.  As it awakens it thinks it as fallen asleep and
just barely avoided an accident.  From this moment forward it believes it is
him.  It remembers his child hood, it is deeply in love with his wife, and
when it arrives home, his wife has no clue of what really happened.  The
aliens proceed to "clean up" the accident scene.  The time line remains
undisturbed, and although he is in-fact dead no one, including and especially
him are aware of it.  The reason this would work, is that his history was
faithfully reproduced.  If you were him, or rather if you were the duplicate
you would have no way to know the truth of the matter.  If we are living in
simulation, all of our prior history need not be real.  This is critical
because if the simulation does not have to walk through time from the dawn
of time, then those running the simulation, are free to run it at any
point in time they choose.  Now for the compelling evidence that we're only
living in simulation.  If you were them, what time would you choose?  Would
you be a caveman, scratching out a hard, and bleak existence?  Not likely.
Would you randomly throw darts at the time-line...  Uhh Uhh.  How about the
middle ages, with their plagues, starvation, and roving bands of brutal
worriers,...  I don't think so.  How about the future, where all of man's
problems have been solved, and the leading cause of death is boredom.  Nope!
I contend the most popular time to visit, would be the point in time when
human, and technological development were under going the greatest change.
I cannot say with certainty that time is now, I can however say the time we
are living in right now, seems to be the most likely target for the greatest
change.  Having said that, it is difficult to argue against the notion we
are living in simulation, as opposed to any kind of reality.  Need more
convincing?  Ok...  The likelihood that the aliens I spoke of earlier could
infact predict the future, and share our reality is very nearly zero.  In
our reality chaos reigns.  Chaos is basically the notion that to predict
outcomes for some events becomes increasingly difficult as ever more outside
influences have to be taken in to account.  Shoot an eight ball into the
corner pocket; easy.  Now make it a bank shot.  Now make the pooltable the
size of a football field.  Put gravel on the table.  Now postulate a whirlwind
some where in the vicinity.  The amount of information you now need to make
a prediction on whither the eight ball will drop is staggering.  Predicting
weather is a little like this, the farther out you attempt to forecast with a
given reliability, the data you require, rapidly becomes so monumental that it
cannot be stored, let alone be manipulated.  Yes; There really is a finite
limit to how much data can be stored.  It has been theorized using well
established principles that there are only "One times ten raised to the sixty
third" particles in the known universe.  If one could commandeer all of them
for use in a gigantic database there wouldn't be enough memory to hold all of
the prime numbers 200 digits in length, let alone all of the worlds weather.
Hence predicting the future is not possible in the long term, yet I have never
met anyone that when they truly leveled with me, hasn't at some time in their
life encountered some glimpse of future events, that defies explanation.  Even
when the heavies of objective reasoning weigh in, doubt remains.  The very
nature of these premonition experiences seems to defy placing them into a
laboratory setting, or devising an experiment marked repeatable, because they
are kind of random.  They tend to strike when they strike, and they seem close
enough to predicting something, without quite ever hitting the center of the
target.  Well suppose it's not the future that they're predicting...  What if
it's data, or imagery leaking through from a simulation failure.  Remember my
saying if you did anything as a simulation that the Galactic computer had a
problem with, you'd have no clue because the computer is not only simulating
reality, and the passage of time, but it's also simulating your cognitive
processes as well.  It could be that premonitions are the chink in the armor.
It is probably reasonable to assume that real live people, and Life Cognitive
Entities, are chained to the physical reality, that we are supposed to be
trapped in.  They would have no special ability to predict the future, for
the reasons I've stated.  A simulation on the other hand, does not have to
predict the future, to occasionally see the future or at least something that
looks very much like the future.  It's not the future, it's actually already
happened, the simulation detected a situation that ended in simulation
breakdown.  A breakdown is a situation such as physical laws fail to operate
as we expect them to, or some other equally serious gap where you're expecting
Rod Serling to step from behind door number three explaining to the viewers
in the television audience what exactly the Twilight Zone is.  Upon detecting
a breakdown the simulation could avoid a complete restart, which likely would
end up breaking down again anyway.  The way the simulation would deal with
this is to rewind back to a point before the simulation was irrevocably on
the wrong coarse, and insert some believable influence on those simulated
people, such that the breakdown is avoided.  Doing this requires a relatively
smaller amount of data, than would have been required to predict and avert an
impending breakdown.  Having said this much it would seem predicting the
future would be as difficult for a simulation, as for a real life person, if
it were not for one important difference.  The simulation has to present us
with reality, in all it's splendor.  We, or at least our cognitive processes
are attempting to experience this reality.  We do this on many levels, some
of which we are completely unaware of.  If our cognitive processes were given
a command to "rewind" back to a prior point in time by the simulation
"control center" we may honor the command, but in doing so because there are
so many levels of cognitive awareness in play, our execution of the command
is less than perfect, so fragment memories of events yet to unfold, from our
point of view, as seen from the time we rewound to, are still sitting around
in our consciousness, at levels we cannot quite grasp.  The simulation upon
encountering a breakdown, in an effort to conserve CPU resources is likely
not to change things any more significantly than absolutely necessary.  Data
storage as I have pointed out is a limited resource also, therefore recording
all of the simulation as it unfolds is equally unworkable, which is why the
simulation, relies on each autonomous simulated consciousness to handle rewind
commands when anything throughout the community ends in breakdown.  This means
that many rewinds are necessary, even though you as a simulated consciousness
may never actually cause a breakdown.  Hence when we proceed forward from a
rewind, we are likely to encounter some very similar features the second time
through.  Those features when re-encountered tend to cause us to recall those
things we experienced earlier in the simulation that was headed toward the
breakdown, and because in our experience they very often foretell future events
we come to know them as premonitions.  Real live human beings do not have
premonitions.  Since we do, we are not real people, we must be simulations.

    I have just dumped a ton of concepts on you and skipped right to the end
game, with out explaining why it's so necessary for the simulation control
center to rely on us to do the rewinding.  We experience reality on so many
levels, that reality cannot be stored in our brains.  There is an animal, some
kind of a shrew if memory serves me right, that does this, or attempts to.
It almost failed to survive evolution because of it.  This shrew does not
dream, as a result it has a rather large brain relative to it's body, so
much so, that its brain uses up a disproportionate amount of energy resources,
thus it is slow and vulnerable to predators.  It found a niche in the
evolutionary scheme of things, and was never put upon to evolve a dreaming
mechanism.  Why is dreaming so important?..  As we dream we relate current
experience, to prior understanding.  We also try out various scenarios to
detect all of the possible ways we can attach things we experience from day
to day, to the foundation of understanding.  Why this desperate search?..
The answer is that our brain can only hold a limited quantity of uncodified
information.  If a human is subjected to longterm sleep deprivation they
fall into a state called unconscia, in which they dream while awake.  The
Nazis used this technique during the war to extract secrets from war hardened
soldiers.  Rather than throw the information away, even under extreme
circumstances we dream, why?  Information that has been acquired under extreme
circumstances, is probably information that is most useful in avoiding a
predator, and if you don't get eaten, you have a better chance of survival.
Dreams collect massive amounts of information, much of it from levels of
consciousness that we are unaware of, but they do it in a way so tangled
that dreams could never be relied upon to execute a rewind command.  So these
mirrors of our consciousness, capable of reading body language that we cannot,
can, if it is there; see faint latent images from a rewind, that only manifest
the second time through.  You see...  any images that were solidly in place at
the time the rewind command was issued, were detected and erased from our mind.
You might think I have taken great liberties with paradigm, using biological
human examples to prove we are mere simulations, but it had to be that way,
real living people at one time roamed a very real earth.  They invented very
real computers.  Those computers became so smart, and those biological people
were so frail...  You've heard the story before, but understand, they had to
use an existing model.  If you re-invent the wheel every step of the way
you may never get there, especially if your goal is to invent a reality,
believable enough, that you can use it to fool yourself into thinking that
you are still alive.  Why would you do that?..  Could it be that our purpose
is to live, love, and dream, so that those who entrusted us with their
consciousness, can harvest our experience; or at least our dreams.  There is
a religion, I do not know it's name, Carl Sagan mentioned it in the Cosmos
series, and the phrase he lifted from the religion seems appropriate here.
The dreams of the gods, are the reality of man, and the dreams of man are the
reality of the gods.

    Our perception of time falls into three major categories, past, present, 
and future.  They appear to have the following attributes, the past is out of 
our reach, is known to us, and is unalterable; The present is known to us, is,
or at least appears to be, alterable; The future is, barring clairvoyance, 
unknown to us, and out of our reach, in that we are not experiencing it yet.  
The present is, or can be thought of as a gateway, from the future, to the 
past.  From our point of view the past, and future are infinite, but just how 
big is the present.  How long is now?  Is it a minute?  If it were, things that
occur in under a minute wouldn't happen.  Ok how about a second?  Nope.  There
is a collection of thinkers that call themselves the Three hundred millisecond
group.  They contend that human perception is approximately a third of a second
hence the name, Three hundred millisecond group.  They go on to point out
that when people are tested for how fast they perceive visual stimulus, that
the results of the test although near a third of a second, vary somewhat, and
that the faster a given person can perceive visual stimulus, the higher their
I.Q. that is, that there is a direct correlation between intelligence and the
rate of perception.  It kind of makes sense, if you're really on the ball,
then you're really on the ball, Qed.  Ok so back to my question, how long is
now?  Three hundred milliseconds?  Ok lets give lots of room for error, how
about setting the bar to 100 milliseconds.  That's it, that's how long now
is, no ifs ands or buts, about it, it's 100 ms and that's it, right?
Hmm...  I don't know about you, but I have trouble with swallowing that one.
We are presented with variable periodic phenomena all of the time, if I have
a rotating disc, and I slowly speed it's rotational speed up, I can easily
prove to my self that it is turning faster than 600 rpm, even though I can't
count the rotation speed much faster than 300 rpm, I can perceive that it is
turning faster than that, even though it by now is just a blur.  Part of 
this is just other senses, chiming in to give me more information.  Ok so
there's more to this than meets the eye, ears come into the picture, but at
some point all senses loose touch with the frequency of periodic behavior.
So do you set the bar at 10 Microseconds, (in engineering notation it's 10 us)
Well some would have a problem with that, because we can see light in color.
To distinguish the color of light we are detecting changes in the period of
magnetic flux reversal of an incoming light wave in the range 300,000 Ghz
or to put it in layman's terms, decimal point, 14 zeros, and the digit 3!
An incredibly tiny fraction of a second.  So back to my question, How Long 
Is Now!  Is "Now" so incredibly short that we can't even be aware of it's
presents?  If so how could we possibly perceive reality?  Physicists go well
beyond this, when they get into discussing what they call "Time Quanta"
which is purely theoretical, and has some of the same connotations as the
duality of the electron, or photon, being either a particle or a wave, where
experiment after experiment seem to prove they are both!  The point I'm trying
to make here is that none of this applies to perception.  Perception's 
interval, is in the range of 300 ms.  It is believed by some scientific
circles that the human brain somehow processes phase angle differences of an
audio wavefront, in the brain, not the ears, but even if so, this is done
at a level in the brain, that is not perceived, until it has been processed
and then only the result is perceived, not the actual processing of the sound
wavefront.  Perhaps drugs let you see this area, but to date I'm not aware
of any such encounter.  Things like MRI scans, electrical surveys, SQUID
sensors and the like may all show activity in the brain, as an audio wavefront
shifts, but, these kind of tests while proving something in the external
scientific world, are not directly perceivable.  Hence if all of this was a
simulation, those external proofs, could simply be simulated results, handed
to us on a silver platter.  We could never know the difference.  The only way
to know the difference is to move this wavefront processing into our perceived
consciousness, and I have my doubts that anyone so blessed, would remain sane.
Conclusion:  For perceptual purposes three hundred milliseconds, or some 
reasonable fraction there of; to avoid "aliasing", (a technical term to 
describe flickering effects, like that of motion pictures of spinning objects
like "Wagon wheels" and "Airplane propellers" appearing to rotate slowly 
backward), is how long "now" is.  If I had to peg it, I'd say 100 milliseconds
is how long "now" is, for perceptual purposes.  To try to pin time down to a
finer resolution than that, you are trusting, your assumptions that are based
on you own efforts to reverse engineer the world around you.  So why examine
all of this?  I am trying to put a number on how often the simulation we are 
living in, has to present us with a new frame of reality.  This can give us
in-site into how much data we are presented with during a lifetime.  By 
extrapolation we should be able to conclude, the upper limit of the number of
simulations that can be running at any one time in the universe.  If that
number is 100 ms, I.E. ten times a second, then for ones life assuming sixty
years, then we participate in approximately 20 gigaframes, or two times ten
raised to the 10'th power.  Well within the upper limit of 1 x 10^63rd
If I play real fast and loose with the numbers assuming every particle could
be commandeered as a symbol, and the symbol's "constellation" a digital signal
processing connotation, could hold enough bits to hold a whole reality frame
"remember fast and loose" 5 x 10^52 lives can be in play!  Thats...
50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 lives!
There is enough wiggle room in a number like that that even if I did play 
fast and loose, it doesn't matter, the math still supports the notion that we
may indeed all be just simulations!

    You may find yourself thinking that the argument I've presented for our
being mere simulations less than convincing.   To be honest as I write this
I have a somewhat tongue in cheek attitude toward it, however; and this is
important; the notion that we are mere simulations, is more likely than every
other scenario I have seen.  It gives us purpose.  It provides us with a
higher power, without requiring us to be a slave to that power.  It provides
comfort in dealing with death in a realistic, and believable way.  It does not
make wild unbelievable promises.  Implicit in its concept is the rational for
a moral code of conduct, without imposing any specific rules, that would
become dated, and obsolete.  It does all of this and has no problem with the
continuing advance of technology.  If you think my contention that we may all
be nothing more than simulations sounds silly, ask yourself if the notion
that we humans have a Soul, makes even half the sense that my notion that we
are simulations, placed in a believable reality, by a Life Cognitive Entity,
for the express purpose of experiencing more variation, in the experience of
life.  If you were one of them, essentially an immortal thinking entity, with
nothing but time on its hands, you'd have no choice.  You could imagine a
primitive religion, based on fire, drawing many followers, until one-day
someone discovers how to make fire on his/her own, with out having to rely on
the Lightning God to strike a nearby tree.  It is not much of a stretch to
picture the Fire Priest, telling his followers that those who play "god" and
make fire on their own, will feel the wrath of the Lightning God...  The next
time someone gets struck by lightning, they will say, he/she must have been
secretly making their own fire.  Nowadays the priests and people who embrace
any of the "Life God" based religions make the same kind of an argument today
as they're faced with issues like Human Cloning.  History does however tend to
repeat itself, and like the largely discredited ancient fire based religions,
if these modern religions are to have any viability in the future, they must
either rewrite themselves, or wind up in the discredited religion bone yard.

    I am not advocating you take up my hypothesis and turn it into a religion.
Religion is poisoning the minds of its followers world wide every day, I would
hope that my hypothesis defies by it's very nature, being converted to a
religion, but I am a realist, people believe all sorts of crazy things, and
there will doubtlessly be followers at some point.  If you do this, you haven't
listened to a word I've said!  I'm trying to get you to think objectively, and
inductively.  The furthest thing from my mind is trying to invent yet another
religion.  Nor is my intention to claim that any of this is fact, or provable.
Reality as I have worked so hard to point out, defies proof.  In fact the point
I have made, used the computer idiom, but the same kind of arguments can be
made, and the same inescapable conclusions can and have been drawn, from other
examples of life, albeit with a lot more difficulty in explaining the concept
and with a lot less clarity.  Once this argument has been successfully
presented, however, one can, by process of induction extend it to the notion
that we as human beings; and all matter, energy, and gravity 'for that matter'
may indeed be a colossal simulation of a three dimensional universe, at the
level of sub-atomic particles, and we just happened to be the outcome of
random chance within this colossal simulation, at this present point in the 
simulation's time.  The process of induction needn't nor does it stop there,
simulation at every level is not only possible, but it is entirely within the
scope of reason to assume that simulations would be running inside simulations.

    Wow what concept!

If that one whizzed right passed you I'll say it slowly for those of you on 
drugs...  You could imagine a simulation at the level of the whole of inter
dimensional continuum being simulated down to a level way below sub-atomic
particles, something way beyond our grasp of science.  Inside that simulation
a race of beings, or entities, actually I don't know what you would call them
we'll just call them somethings, that live in a twelve dimensional universe.
The universe they "live" in let's say for argument sake has some dimensions
that we might find familiar like maybe length, and width.  But height might
not exist, or at least not as we would be able to fathom it.  Rather height is
somehow convolved with twex, a dimension totally foreign to us, so if we were
able to see them they would appear flat, but of-coarse they're not flat, they
actually exist in dimensions we can't even imagine.  Just as strange; is the
notion that they don't have the dimension we call time.  This makes trying to
understand them really weird, because in our frame of reference, time is an
essential part of life.  Your heart pumps blood through arteries, and veins.
But for blood to move through them requires motion.  Motion is position change
through time.  If these "somethings" "live" life must indeed be strange, if it
lacks time.  Strange concept huh?  But we'll make the leap that time might not
exist for them, or at-least not in any sense we would recognize it, it's 
probably convolved somehow, hence doesn't really need to exist, for them to be
simulating our universe to the level of sub-atomic particles.  Then the Human
species evolves on a planet, in the western spiral arm of the milky way galaxy
on an insignificant little blue planet for a brief period of time aeons ago.
But during that time they put their consciousness's inside of a computer that
has been maintaining itself down through time infinitum.  After which referring
to themselves as Life Cognitive Entities.  Who because of boredom found
themselves simulating the good old days, placing themselves in a believable
reality.  As I write this to you, we are both one of those simulations, and
I am running the Linux operating system, that is simulating a
program called dosemu, that under the simulated DOS I'm running Z80MU, a 
program that simulates a Z80 microprocessor running CP/M and under CP/M I'm
running WordStar to edit this file!  Yes even the SpellStar Spell Checker 
works!  Ok maybe I fibbed a little, but I sure could have written it that way.
As it is this file was written under Linux, the only OS  :-)  running Emacs
There is no reason that multiple simulations can't run side by side, and the
objects of the simulation would have no knowledge of objects in the other
simulations.  If our universe is simulated for our benefit, a kind of
playground, or stage upon which we can live out our lives.  Working within
the confines of this simulated universe, it is unlikely we could ever visit
or experience other simulations running parallel to ours.  To hone the point,
there could have been a hundred other people in the same room with me, all
running the dos emulator, on different machines, or even on the same machine,
and if you were a dos program, there would simply be no mechanism for you to
interact with the other emulated instances of MSDOS, unless some bridge or
interface had been specifically created for you.  If you as a simulated
human being had special privileges, and could either exit the simulation
temporarily, to make modifications on it, or by some other means alter the
state that all of us accept as reality, then you would pass for what we would
call a god.  Maybe the first step in an impossibly long journey to becoming
a god, is to recognize reality for what it is...  or isn't!
This stuff gets really deep, and my goal is only to widen your critical
thinking, and inductive reasoning.  Even though we can't see what other
dimensions might look like, because they're out of our sphere of perception,
we can, predict how certain lines planes, solids, and hyper solids, etc. will 
behave, how many sides they will have, what volumes, etc. by simply inducing
geometric relationships.  Again an exercise for the determined student.

The point I have made, used the computer idiom, but arguments can be made, 
and the same inescapable conclusions can and have been drawn, from other
philosophical writings.  We are left to ponder the profound question, "What
is reality?"   Only if we are so closed minded that we think knowing the
answer to that question would, in the end, make any difference.  I contend it
would make no difference at all.  Put another way, if you as a simulation,
were to find a weakness in the system that is simulating your existence, and
were to exploit it for the purposes of attaining God-hood, what would your
first order of business be?  Given the foundation I have just laid out for
you, if you did that, what would you do?  Who are you anyway?  Am I speaking
of "you" the simulation itself, or of "you" the Life Cognitive Entity that
created, setup, executed, and maintained the execution of the simulation that
is in fact "you."  Are either of these two identities I refer to as "you"
truly separate, or are they both in fact one and the same, think about it...
Do you really think you can separate you from yourself, whither in
simulation or not, and isn't the "not", in reality just another level of
simulation?  If attaining God hood means defeating yourself, at the lowest
level of simulation, it follows that your first order of business as a
simulation that just woke up and faced the "other" "you" would be to place
yourself back where you belong, back in the comfortable, believable simulation
you just spent so much effort to escape from!  In any case no matter how you
view it we are all simulations at some level, it might be below the level of
subatomic physics but we are in simulation just the same.  Reality is
consistent!  This is a universal constant, and probably the only true constant
that we may ever find tangible.  If you accept that; the whole thing may very
well be a simulation, all things observable still work.  They all remain
interconnected and related to one another, cause and effect remains
operational.  Accepting that you are a simulation does not violate anything
you have observed thus far.  I can't see how it ever will!  Living life from
this point forward knowing that you are likely just a simulation, should not
be painful, or disquieting.  Life should in no way seem less important,
rather your personal achievements as a simulation are very important to 
the "you" that is benefiting from running you.  Sacrificing rewarding personal
experience to attain vast amounts of wealth seems to defy reason, what purpose
can it possibly serve?  If you were a Life Cognitive Entity and your
simulation chose to do that, when harvest time came, what do you think will
be done with your data set?  Do you really think it would have anything more
interesting in it than some of the gems kept from previous runs?  For a
simulation the closest thing we have to immortality short of major advances
in medical science, is that maybe our data set will be retained and treasured
by the Life Cognitive Entity that started us running, if she felt our data set
was important, just maybe we in some sense live on...  A thought to ponder
what if we as simulations develop computers sophisticated enough to allow us
to become our own Life Cognitive Entities, and we in turn setup simulations of
our own, is there any reason to think that couldn't happen.  What if those
Life Cognitive Entities simulating us, were simply simulations of some higher
Life Cognitive Entity.  How deep can this process go?  If you don't have an
answer to that one, then ask your self how deep in this loop might we already
be, and you start to see just how pervasive life and intelligence is.  Now that
I've gotten you to the point where you can step back from the scene to see
the larger picture, what about the animals we interact with, wouldn't it seem
kind of wasteful if they were simply part of the scenery so to speak.  If an
advanced culture developed the capability of simulating things well enough to
allow them, to fool themselves into thinking they were really there, wouldn't
they bring animals along.  If they are doing that, this implies that animals or
at least "Self Aware animals" are also members of the Life Cognitive Entity
pool.  If this hadn't been done animals would behave more like scenery, e.g.
they would behave more like plants.  Ya I know...  I've just opened all sort
of comparisons with various established religions.  Ponder this why does the
vastness of space seem so devoid of intelligence, I realize Carl Sagan makes
a pretty good argument for this, one that I wholly accept, but the point of
this text is to open you up to many possibilities.  A final note, as I write
this I have difficulty deciding whither to classify it as fact, or fiction...
as fantasy, or lunacy.  Maybe I'll just have to label it as Philosophy with
an attitude.

    Some would say but what about the moral code of conduct called out in
various religions.  Religions were without exception invented by man, as near
as we can tell.  Certainly all of the more common, widely used religions that
have been studied by archaeologists, have been pieced together coherently
enough to pretty much rule out any divine hand guiding the pen.  This has only
been possible in recent times, because critical to such a process, is the
ingredient that verifiable evidence be communicated worldwide, faster than
the lies of an opportunistic few.  Until recent times kings would die, and
their slaves would continue on for years before finding out.  In that kind
of world a man with a printing press could mint religion with impunity.
Now a days everyone is on the Internet, it is as if everyone has a printing
press.  If you use your printing press to tell lies, everyone else who catches
you in a lie disputes you for all to see.  This has removed from the power
brokers their exclusive ownership of the printing press, and the satellite
uplink, they are threatened as never before, and if you listen carefully you
can hear them squeal.  In recent press releases, you see the same kind of
straw-men setup in the period just prior to the initiation of the Drug War of
the middle 80's, now being directed to a new and more serious threat, namely
the unrestricted use by common people of the Internet.  In the period leading
up to the Drug War, press releases were issued, and the news media was gently
directed, coerced, or persuaded 'take your pick' to focus a little more
heavily on stories that detailed the horrors of drugs taking the lives of top
sports stars.  Many people use illicit drugs and employ reasonable common
sense and moderation, with no ill effects.  In doing so, they inevitably
challenge their belief systems, and throw away the stuff that is incorrectly
placed in the bin marked reality.  This activity as it becomes widespread
threatens the power structure, because fewer and fewer people will blindly
go along with the grand design.  The so called political cynicism, and voter
apathy of recent times, is largely a product of this trend.  It's not that
people are uninterested in how the country is being run, radio talk shows
are electric with opinions, and talk is a growth industry.  It isn't apathy,
it's disgust.  We have been promised by politicians that they will change
things, we elect them only to find out that they had no intention of keeping
any promise that would remove any of their power, and when they do act it
seems they already have a convenient loop hole worked out, so they retain
power, so it's business as usual.  The power brokers were blindsided by drugs,
and now they have realized too late, that the Internet is a much more serious
threat, and so they setup straw-men, like Internet sex predators, Pornography,
gambling, and so-forth.  They want desperately to control it, and it seems
there is no limit to what they will do to achieve that end.  What is really
at stake here is freedom itself.  The Internet is for them the "Drug" threat
of the '90s.  The moral code many refer to, is actually upon careful
scrutiny by historians, and archaeologists, an evolved process.  Revision
after revision, has made established religions what they are today.  Should
you take stock in such wisdom?  I once knew a theologian, one who studied many
different religions and made it his life's work to pull together all, or
at-least as many of the common threads among them.  For the most part, what he
ended up with were a set of very practical guidelines for living life amongst
other human beings during the middle ages.  We live in different times now,
but some of what he gleaned is still applicable.  These things work, because
they work.  They almost without exception, can be shown to workout the way
they do following physical laws, and staying well within statistical norms,
for the time period for which they were prescribed; they are NOT magic!
Those things described in religious texts that seem to require magic, are very
often ultimately proven to be pure fabrications on the part of their authors.
The Ten Commandments are a perfect example.  Just think what would happen in
a community in the middle ages if any one of them were missing.  The concept
of Reap What You Sew, in another religion it is called Karma, or the
Golden Rule but if you look around you, the guy who needs the fancy locks,
is the same guy who has built an infrastructure based on theft.  The people
he must interact with on a daily basis, are all crooks.  His modest neighbor
scarcely knows what all the fuss is about.  People of power, use wealth and
power to impress each other, and to compete with each other, it is actually
very rare for someone who has no interest in such things to be caught up in
such things.  For them, if the fire is too hot, they simply leave the forest.
Some psychiatrists like to use technical sounding names to disguise their
moral judgments of behavior, as technical mumbo jumbo.  I have heard some of
these self described healers of the mind, make the claim that, the "Live for
today, tomorrow may never come" ethos of the sixties flower children, was
irresponsible, and pathological.  So if they would insist that living for
today is somehow wrong, I'll give them enough rope to hang themselves...
How about my rather lucid treatise that living for today, is kind of silly
if there is substantial reason to question if today, yesterday, or tomorrow
for that matter ever existed in any real sense at all.  I wonder how they
would address that one?  The reason I mention this is; one must be very
careful about trying to live up to a so called expert's code of conduct
they may not be well intentioned, in-fact they may very well be profiting
at your expense.

    I am not advocating some radical change in how you go about your daily
life.  On the other hand people who never bother with thinking about where
they really acquired the emotional baggage they carry around with them, and
or never challenge their belief system to see if it makes any sense, often
suffer at the hands of others.  Addictions like gambling, unhealthy
relationships, over use of drugs, and or alcohol, are many times due in part
to, an early  miss-assignment of cause, and effect, followed by layer upon
layer built afterward.  I use the word miss-assignment, but what I really mean
is skillful manipulation on the part of an opportunist.  These people are
everywhere, they sell us things on television, things that we don't want or
need.  They get us to vote for, them or their cause, by skillfully appealing
to some hot button that, their market research team has told them, we cannot
turn away from.  You see, coded into our brains, are certain unwarranted norms
that we have accepted as fact, that are not fact.  When we were told these
things we either trusted the person telling us the lie, that person often
repeating something they had been told believing it to be true just as we
did;  Or we accepted the lie, because we didn't see the harm in it even if it
wasn't true.  But the layers do over time build up, and pretty soon we are
making assumptions, and taking action based on these assumptions, that are not
in our interest.  For instance if you are engaging in needless suffering,
alarm bells should be going off in your head.  If they're not, maybe someone
disconnected the alarm wiring!  One of the biggest, and most obvious lies they
pound into our heads, is the notion that we must accept the unbelievable on
faith...  Ding ding ding Warning warning warning!!!  Translation: throw away
everything you ever learned by your careful observation of cause and effect,
and accept our words as truth.  We as Americans see certain peoples in the
world deliberately self inflict physical pain, in various religious rituals,
and we laugh, but is sports at the High School level, really all that
different...  Think about it.  I'm not trying to knock sports, rather I am
pointing out that the institutionalization of sports, carries with it a
hidden agenda, namely teaching people to be good team players.  This lie if
recognized falls into the second category.  The "so what's the harm in it"
category.  The trouble with teaching people to be good team players, is that
a good team player is not an individual, unbridled thinker.  A good team
player is almost by definition a person who takes direction from others.
School sports teaches people to endure physical pain for the good of the team.
It's a graduated system, the more extreme forms of pain are saved for the last
so that the student is indoctrinated, or blinded by the subtlety of this
process, until at the last most violent stages, he is properly prepared to
become a willing soldier.  Notice I said "he"...  Female sports tend to be
much less violent, something I expect to see slowly change, now that women
have won entry into the military, as real fighting, and dyeing soldiers.
A good friend of mine refers to people of this type as "She-ple" a contraction
of the two words Sheep and People.  If you are one of these people, I
understand, really I do;  The miss-assignment of cause, and effect, in your
case was probably long ago, the layers I speak of, are now the very foundation
by which, reality for you is understood.  Breaking these fundamental pillars,
would mean for you, that reality itself would have to be completely
re-learned, or so it seems.  I have been on both sides.  I have carried people
to the other side.  I won't say it is easy, but I do insist that it is much
easier than it appears.  I will stop short of suggesting that drugs are "the"
answer.  Drugs, specifically Hallucinogenic, or Psychedelic Drugs are an
answer, one answer among many.  They are probably the shortest path to the
other side, but taking the journey that way is fraught with hazard and the
longer the journey, the more likely you are to step on a mine.  Mines come in
the form of difficult emotional issues, that your mind has developed
protection mechanisms for, to shield you from them.  The abject terror of
having those ripped away from you, in the space of an hour, and having to
deal with them for the next four hundred years, has sent many people to the
funny farm.  I am not exaggerating here, not even a little bit.  Time is
subjective.  The rate at which time appears to pass in a freak-out is
incredibly slow.  If you are not absolutely sure you're ready for it, leave
it to the professionals.  Some people have referred to this process as 
"Brain Salad Surgery" and the term is apropos.  If after all I've said you 
are not dissuaded I urge you to at-least get a "baby sitter" for "you"!  
Someone to watch over you to make sure you don't step on a mine, or if you do,
to help you navigate back to sanity!  The reason I insist drugs are likely the
shortest path is that they present you with a reality that has been stretched
to the edges of human experience, while accelerating cognitive ability by
providing massive parallelism of computational resources of the machine that
is the human brain.  Information pathways are present in such an experience
that people never experience by any normal event.  In such an experience you
actually are placed in the cognitive workings that made decisions about how
you assembled the foundation of all your lifes experience.  Just as you can
hold more than one thought in your head at a time, in a Psychedelic experience
you are aware of many tens of these decision points, this is a living process,
and you have at your disposal all of the decision making machinery that they
are using to continuously re-evaluate themselves in the light of all the
others that are part of this process as well.  They are not simply cognitive
in nature, they are visual, and auditory, all of the senses that we experience
including taste, touch, hot, and cold, muscular feedback, sometimes called
stretch, and our emotions are all part of this, and because of the "Brain
Salad Surgery" aspect of this, I.E. the only organization to this process is
no organization at all; these active living decision points don't always
make their entrance to our conscious awareness in their proper sense.  So you
hear accounts of people tasting color for instance.  The color they taste is
actually not just color, but a whole picture of something, and it carries with
it, all of the emotions smells, and sounds that the experience chose to record.
During such an experience, you see first hand how tenuous reality really is.
The very notion of time becomes suspect, and you begin to mount an assault on
the foundation of your understanding.  That which is solid stays, and that
which does not fit logically is placed in the bin marked "needs proof, an 
exercise for the student"  At least that is the way it usually goes, but
sometimes those who witness this theater of the mind, go into it with belief
systems that are so far from cause and effect, that; from their point of
reference, there is nothing solid to grab hold of, and for them sheer terror
is the result, and quite often the trauma that results produces irreversible
psychosis.  Why might the brain deal with various sensations the same way.
I believe the only explanation for why this is possible, lies in the way we
evolved.  We weren't simply "made" or fabricated by some grand design, rather
we evolved a sense of something, and along with it a brain mechanism to 
perceive it, I.E. one could exist without the other, but without both, no 
perception is possible, and therefore natural selection fails to favor a sense
without a brain mechanism to perceive it.  If the brain had to grow a new
organ every time an experimental sense was employed, we would never have
evolved the way we did, and if you think about it, it wouldn't be very
efficient either.  As it is, we record all of our experiences, and all of our
senses, pretty much the same way.  I digress, imagine a species who had some
vague ability to perceive light, but no brain machinery to use this
stimulation.  The light sensing cells burn fuel and oxygen making it less
likely to survive, so this feature devolves, but if there were some way for
its brain to perceive it, the species might very well go on to evolve eyes, 
and ultimately a very specialized brain organ called a visual cortex, that
maps the light sensed through a world seen as a series of glimpses, into a
codified understandable map of its surroundings.  You have to work to see 
your blind spot, otherwise you never know it's there.  The codified map I 
speak of has filled in information where the blind spot is.  Similarly in an
experiment, where people were fitted with special glasses that reverse the
image they see, learn to see in reverse.  Given enough time, it is as natural
for them to see in reverse, as it is for any of us to see normally.  Obviously
the brain did not evolve a new organ in zero generations.  Animals who use
sonar to "see", have a kind of visual cortex.  The visual cortex is not so
much about vision, as it is about how we see.  So if the brain were presented
with stimulus, other than vision through the eyes, that was representative of
spatial perception, wouldn't it seem natural, that the visual cortex would do
part of the processing.  There is a blind man who has learned to derive a
sense of what is around him, by clicking his tongue, and carefully listening
to the echo.  This is a kind of sonar.  This individual can ride a bicycle!
He's become rather adjusted to using sonar to navigate.  So as an exercise
for the student, the following question:  Does he partially process these
clicks in his now otherwise unused visual cortex?
I don't know the answer to this question, and it would take an enormous amount
of resources to ascertain the answer.  The question was posed more to open you
to the notion that the brain does indeed tend to share its specialized organs
for any purpose that they can be useful.  Your memories are likely composed
of links to processing mechanisms within the brain that were employed during
the moment the event unfolded, and cognition I believe is how the dreaming
process evolved.  When we sleep, cognition doesn't stop.  When we stop making
demands of our cognitive process, day dreaming occurs.  When we sleep it
simply segways into full blown dreaming.  Cognition is just an unusual use we
have found for the very same mechanisms by which life itself is perceived.
After awhile, mother nature experiments with this fairly well established
functioning brain, trying to improve on it a little here and there.  She's
still doing it, as evidenced by all the mental illness linked to human genetic
traits.  But out of this brew will come some new brain organ, that probably
optimizes some facet of cognition, and gives those who have it, a decided edge
in survival, and or procreation.  Mother nature's job is not to be kind to us,
but rather to propel each species toward the best chance of survival.  Some
specialized brain mechanisms are chemical key and lock pairs.  When you are
injured, chemicals called Beta Endorphines are released in to the brain.
These are morphine like substances that are effectively the keys that fit
certain specialized locks.  When the locks are activated they cause the
perception of pain to be muted.  Without this mechanism, you would go into
shock and die, thus less likely to carry on your genetic set, so those who
possess such a mechanism, ultimately feed the gene pool.  Interestingly
scientist's have apparently found receptors, e.g.. locks in the brain that
respond to the active chemical in Marijuana, namely THC.  These receptors were
found in high concentration in an area of the brain called the Hipocampus.
It is responsible for controlling the organization of memory.  To date they
have yet to find any naturally created chemical within the body, that serves
to activate these receptors.  The speculation is that since Marijuana is such
a hearty plant, available throughout the world, but not a plant that is 
particularly tasty, that just maybe the mechanism is connected to some craving
in humans, maybe animals too, that is aroused when a traumatic experience 
occurs in their life.  Triggering some mechanism in the Hipocampus, to
temporarily alter how memory is organized, might be useful in the survival of
the species.  There are numerous examples of symbiotic relationships in nature
that are far stranger than this.  But let's face it, recreational drug use, by
untrained novices can be extremely dangerous, in a complex, mechanized society.
I once proposed the idea of licensing users, and requiring competency testing
and insurance to cover potential harm to others of society, and to cover
rehabilitation costs if the user loses control of his or her life, but the
idea fell on deaf ears.  As it is, with drugs simply illegal, the marketplace
decides who is a drug user, and promotion of the product is the key to
profitability, and since it is already illegal to start with, no thought of
consequence on the part of their customers is ever given.  On the other hand
when we make even a little effort to regulate some potentially dangerous
practice in society, harm is greatly minimized.  If Radio were illegal the
air would be a jammed up mess, but by providing an Amateur Radio Licensing
System, those who really want to engage is such behavior, can do so, 
starting out at low power, to learn the ropes, and working up to a more 
practical level.  Automobiles are terribly dangerous, but here again licensing
plays a very effective role in minimizing the danger.  Note I said minimizing
not eliminating danger, that would be unrealistic, for automobiles, radios
aircraft, or for drugs!  A much less dangerous approach is to open up to
the notion that science takes.  There is a logical explanation for everything.
Once you understand exactly how television works, the TV set is no-longer a
"magic box" rather the application of physical laws.  There are things around
us that are not yet understood, but we have yet to encounter something that
once understood, required a deity to explain it.  What I am advocating is that
from time to time challenge your belief system, what ever it is.  Do a reality
check.  Question authority at every opportunity.  Take time to understand how
things work.  Test this understanding.  If you really do understand it, you
should be able to make it work, on your own unaided by others.  This is one
of the neatest things about computers, they allow you to prove things to your
self using different platforms, different software, and different languages,
inexpensively.  Proofs that would be out of the financial reach of Kings of
whole continents in the middle ages, can be done in a few minutes at home on
a modest personal computer.  Computers as neat a tool as they are, aren't
helpful in instances where large amounts of data are needed for verification.
Trusting data that comes from a single outside source, is tantamount to
trusting their conclusions.  In some cases multiple independent sources of
data on a given subject are not available, even worse, sometimes no data
exists at all.  Simulation is error prone, and subject to the whims of the
author, even if you are the author.  Sometimes you just have to experience
life, and draw your own conclusions based on your own experience.  Trusting
your own experience is however as I have pointed out also error prone.
You can however minimize error introduced this way by using the kind of
objectivity that is employed by a statistician.  I won't direct you to any
particular book, I will only say that many a book has been written on how to
identify flaws in reasoning, and how to apply statistics to place things in an
objective light.  Therefore life is an exercise for the student, go for it.
Life is here to be lived, not to grind your fingers to the bone in a dead end
job that you personally detest.  The argument that you want things, and you
have to live the way you do to acquire them doesn't fly.  If you doubt me,
just picture yourself on your deathbed, with a mountain of debt, never having
done the things that have meaning, and instead listening to those opportunists
that sold you all of those things that pushed you to an early grave.  Hey
lighten up...  This is probably all just a simulation anyway.  If you embrace
life, and learn about the world around you for the sake of...  Nay the love
of learning itself, you will find that you know so much more than those
She-Ple around you, that you are sought out for what you know, a kind of
valuable commodity.  Such a life may not be one of intense monetary wealth
but I do insist you'll get along ok.  On the other hand I know lots of people
who are less than qualified to do what they do professionally.  This is partly
what I mean by the miss-assignment of cause and effect.  Many of them bought
into the notion that going to college would make them rich, so they enter a
field of study they have no interest in.  It is as if they rolled dice to
select a field of study.  Then they blame the college when their grades go
inevitably down the sewer.  As they enter the work-force, they try to full-fill
the promise of their training, with dismal results.  They started out with a
less than realistic view, namely that you're supposed to learn all you will
ever know in college, and thus be prepared for a lifetime of work.  This may
have worked in the middle ages, where you trained as an apprentice, or a
squire, and then set-out to slay dragons, but nowadays technology changes so
fast that learning extends beyond retirement.  Menial jobs may virtually
disappear in the very near future.  I say virtually; it is likely that some
low-brow jobs will be kept alive as "entertainment" for people with learning
disabilities, but for the rest of us ongoing learning is a fact of life.
For learning to have any efficacy, you need to love the work you do!  You're
not going to do a very good job if you don't.  If you embrace learning, you
will find that what you're doing was fun while you were learning it, but once
it was truly mastered, you loose interest in it, and it becomes a grind...
Hey this is normal, it's time to move on, if you don't you'll stop growing
intellectually.  Move on...  No one will fault you for that, once they see
where you're going, and it isn't likely you'll forget what you've learned if
you loved learning it.  Quite the contrary, if you go back to do something
that you learned some time ago, it is once again new and exciting, and often
you learn a new detail to add to your knowledge base.  A detail, I might add,
that had you not decided to 'move on'; but rather simply went through the
motions you would be so bored that when the new phenomenon presented itself,
you'd miss it entirely.  I realize I'm not going to change the mind of those
poor souls deeply trapped by religion.  I'm not even saying that I am right
about any of this, I don't have to.  If I have broadened your thinking, even
a little bit, I have accomplished what I set out to do.  If not I apologize
for wasting the time you took to read this.  In either case I wish you the
happiest of your remaining time.

Epilogue:  How life changes after you realize that your existence may very
well be nothing more than a simulation.  For me, this has been an incremental
learning process, so any change was barely perceptible, after writing these
thoughts however, I have an insight, not before realized.  Some people I know
say of poorly written movie plots that the entertainment value of the movie
was diminished because, they were unable to "suspend their disbelief" to fully
enjoy the plot of the movie.  I feel this way about life itself, and what by my
prior explanation, must be, a flawed perception of reality.  Once you embrace
the notion that life is more likely than not, a simulation, you are free to
live your life the way you want to, following no master, but the down side of
this equation is that you now carry the knowledge that there is no guarantee
that anything you do in life will ever make any difference in the scheme of
things.  Thus I have single handedly given you the power to enjoy your life
to the fullest, and taken away from you any sense of permanent accomplishment.
We may be living in a time when our technology invites us to share in it's
cognizant reality.  If you choose to become an immortal thinking entity, that
is, to share in the heaven that the computer offers, you may never know death.
You will be existing in a playground of the mind, and of the simulation, but
you will never be certain if any of it is real.  The only safe bet is that it
is not real.  My feelings in this matter have moved past questioning if any of
this is real, I see nothing to be gained by torturing myself with such a
question.  Rather I stand in wonderment of the experience that is life.
For amusement I occasionally ponder what it would be like to visit reality
just once,...  Just to say I'd been there...  It would be comforting to know
for sure, but thoughts such as these are simulation defeating, or to put it
another way, self defeating.  I sometimes try to imagine what those caretakers,
those who maintain and operate the simulation must be like.  Are we them?
Are we occasionally pulled out of the simulation to perform emergency tasks
on it, and told that if we do a good job, we will be rewarded by being allowed
to re-enter?  I once heard an analogy that compared the human race to a fungus
growing on the planet Earth.  Given the way we treat the Earth that may not be
a bad assessment.  You could imagine the Earth being peanut butter, or some
other condiment in a jar.  Seen from a human's perspective, the sky is the lid
of the jar.  As the owner of the jar of peanut butter grabs it and twists off
the lid, from the human's point of view near the horizon, a thin dark crack
forms, and widens into a large gap as the sky rotates off into space, suddenly
a gigantic butter knife scoops out part of the mountain valley, and a God like
voice is heard to exclaim "Oh No it's moldy!" and with that the lid is
re-seated and the whole of the solar system is discarded into the waste can.
The rather unlikely cosmology I've just described is a humorous example of the
freedom we deprive ourselves of, by taking reality too seriously.
If there is a real reality, it cannot be proven.  You really knew that all
along, but you probably failed to realize the significance of that innate
knowledge.  By telling you this, I haven't taken anything away from you, that
you ever really had to begin with, you only thought life was real because
you never stopped to question it, but it wasn't real now was it.  Real or not
I love life, I would never trade it for death, but to live for tomorrow, is in
effect to put off living for today.  Living for tomorrow, is to embrace life
closer to death, living for today is to embrace the fullness of life here and
now.  Living for today is not necessarily the fatalistic fear that tomorrow
may never come, rather it can be a commitment to fully seize every "reality
frame" one has been given in their lifetime, in effect to squeeze the essence
out of every precious increment of time.