by James Wallace Harris, 6/15/25
If I ignore the depressing news on my screens, I can step out of my front door and view a beautiful world. Looking at the photo above, do you see heaven or hell? We seldom consider Earth a paradise, but we all experience moments of beauty and serenity, as well as moments of pain and suffering. We spend our lives avoiding the one and seeking the other.
For most of my life, I felt like I was climbing a hill towards my dreams, but now, in my seventies, it feels like I’m sliding down that hill. I wonder if I’ve been chasing fantasies while ignoring reality. There is a book of conversations with Philip K. Dick called What If Our World Is Their Heaven? I’ve often wondered if we were living in heaven and didn’t know it, or worse, what if we were living in heaven and were turning it into hell.
Over the last several years, theories have been proposed that our universe is an artificial reality. I’ve always objected to that idea, but it asks a fascinating philosophical question: If we’re living in a synthetic reality, did we choose to be in it? Why would we want to experience so much pain and suffering?
I’ve always believed our existence is a Darwinian reality where everything happens due to randomness. If I believed in God, I would have to ask: Why do you make us suffer?
Hinduism and the concept of reincarnation also suggest something interesting. That belief system claims we are souls coming to this reality to evolve, and suffering is a teaching tool.
Whether we are here by accident or choice, it still leaves the question: Why do we suffer? If our pains are due to the luck of the draw, how do we make the best of a bad situation? If we’re in some kind of cosmic classroom, what are we supposed to learn? And if we’re a participant in a monstrous computer game, how do we win?
Is it delusion to think our place in the universe is anything other than an accident?
Because an algorithm observed me read one story on coping with life in my seventies, they have sent me many more. I’ve seen list after list of the personality traits of those who survive well and those who don’t. I can’t help but wonder if there is a correlation between belief and how we survive.
Do people who believe life has no purpose succumb quicker than those who think we do? And even if we accept that we’re living a Darwinian existence, aren’t there two approaches to that, too? Isn’t existentialism a positive choice over naturalism or fatalism?
Even people of rock-solid faith die horrible deaths. Few people escape this world without suffering. If suffering is so integral to existence, what is its purpose?
JWH
Auxiliary Memory 
I might be able to help a little bit on what type of Universe we inhabit.
Rather than an artificial reality what is being proposed is that we are living in a simulation. The closer you look, the more and more it does look like a simulation, but this could be a self-evolving simulation not requiring some super intelligence with the mother of all quantum computers running a Universe program. You can have a very good discussion with ChatGPT on this subject and it comes back with some fascinating ideas. You can also read Scott Adams’ “Reframing the Brain” to see how he also thinks along these lines and he also discusses how that can explain how/why affirmation, and visualisation seem to work.
We can’t however get to the source code to change the Universe itself, as the Universe is itself the (evolutionary) source code that is running.
However, the mega-brains amongst us might work out how you can alter the local source code to their own advantage, and maybe that’s what the Lizard people are doing right now 🙂
Lizard people? Do you mean aliens? Are you suggesting something like QUARANTINE by Greg Egan.
How is a simulation different from an artificial reality?
How could a simulation evolve? Simulation implies it’s based on something.
Lizard people? Sorry I thought just about everyone has heard of David Icke – clearly not ??
The evolving Universe simulation is based on IT from BIT https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/physicist-john-wheeler-and-the-it-from-bit [http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5fac380b9cda2c532cffb9e8/t/649d7d142157dc2f9e65f5d0/1688042772548/WHEELER.jpeg?format=1500w]https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/physicist-john-wheeler-and-the-it-from-bit Physicist John Wheeler and the “It from Bit” – John Horgan (The Science Writer)https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/physicist-john-wheeler-and-the-it-from-bit June 29, 2023. Is quantum mechanics weird if no one is paying attention to it? Lots of people are paying attention to it now, including me.Two physicists often cited in debates about the theory’s meaning are John Wheeler and David Bohm, both of whom I interviewed in the early 1990s and feature in The End of Science.I thought my profiles of these physicists might contribute to current quantum … johnhorgan.org
I tend to agree with this:
“But Wheeler himself has suggested that there is nothing but smoke. “I do take 100 percent seriously the idea that the world is a figment of the imagination,” he told physicist/science writer Jeremy Bernstein in 1985. Wheeler must know that this view defies common sense: Where was mind when the universe was born? And what sustained the universe for the billions of years before we came to be? He nonetheless bravely offers us a lovely, chilling paradox: At the heart of everything is a question, not an answer. When you peer down into the deepest recesses of matter or at the farthest edge of the universe, you see, finally, your own puzzled face looking back at you.”
I don’t think our minds offer any particular value to reality. Reality is just churning through all the possibilities. We suffer the delusion of self-importance.
Mind was born with the Universe. There is but one Mind, it is external to us and we all share a part of it. This is 2,500 year old Pythagorean philosophy 🙂
Best,
Greg
I have thought about these type of things often. I find it fascinating. I’ve always like the idea that we are living in a simulation, although I don’t really believe that. But I find it might explain some of the horrors people go through in the seeming meaninglessness of many people’s life. I can almost picture a group of nerdy aliens somewhere who have invented this game and they just toy with various scenarios to see how we respond, as they have assigned the different personalities and mental fluidity of all of us.
However, I do believe it’s Darwinian real and as for meaning, I think that’s a very individual thing that some people develop and others do not. For me, meaning is basically the privilege I feel in being able to view all of nature and all of its life, including the vast universe and mysteries that it holds… just knowing it’s out there.
I’m not religious so I don’t believe in reincarnation or heaven and hell and I believe when you die that’s it. However, there could be some consciousness mystery we simply do not understand. And even if there is that continuation, we probably don’t know, as the “me-ness” that we currently have, is gone with death.
I play with these ideas but ultimately I always go back to a random reality and existentialism. I find suffering easier to accept if comes from chance rather than design. I think reality is too freaking big to have been created by a diety or work as a simulation.
It’s more comforting to know I’m here by accident and I have to make the best of my particular situation on my own.
i feel like i’m in paradise this afternoon..