This Note Is A Simulation

If you are reading this, you're reading it on a screen. Either you are me, Gwynne, the person writing this reading it back to herself, or you're someone else reading it on the internet, creating a mental simulation of who Gwynne is based on what little information you know about her. (Well, me, since I am Gwynne writing this.)

You are not reading my actual thoughts. Those are long gone, data-encoded electric impulses in my brain that shaped those subconscious impulses into words, sent those words through my fingers to the keyboard with a skill I learned in the late 80s, into a hard drive, and simulated by a computer on a screen. Maybe your phone, maybe your computer, or maybe by now it is being projected right into your brain because the internet enables asynchronous data transfer in ways never seen before in human history. Someone could potentially read this 100 years after I'm writing it, if the data is preserved that long.

Of course, it IS being projected right into your brain through your eyeballs - or your ears if you're using any text-to-speech tools or perhaps your fingers if you're blind and using a Braille screen reader.

But I mean like beamed directly into your brain, not through any of your organs of perception.

Just zap right into the meat sack.

But would it be fundamentally different from the way this note is already being beamed into your brain?

Still wrestling with that, and I encountered that question in a Neuroethics class winter semester 2024.

You are not reading the actual thought that I had as I was having it. Even I, as I write this, am not actually able to read the full thought as I'm having and writing it. I have to pause periodically and retrace it in my head, and that's not a linear or purely verbal thing - though being able to go back and read the string of thoughts being simulated in this note is helpful in fully realizing the thought.

You're reading a simulation of clusters of thoughts I've had that I used writing to process into something that could be transmitted to you.

And like any simulation, it's a shallow copy of the real thing.

A Hypermap of the a complex web of ideas, questions, feelings, intuitions, perceptions, memories, and so on, distilled into words that never really capture the totality of the thought, and must continually be revised to get a little bit closer to it.

This note is a simulation, and as you read it, your mind is simulating a parasocial conversation.

Those words are often said with derision by people who think there needs to be a hierarchy of relationships and perceptions and that only real ones can have value.

Our brain is simulating reality all the time. Does my blue look like your blue? Maybe not if we're looking at this through different graphics processors and monitors, or if the thoughts are being beamed directly into your head, you might not see the blue background and pink accents at all.

Everything is a simulation, nothing is real.

Do we panic?

Spend the rest of our lives paralyzed by existential panic?

Or rushing back to the comforting holes of consumption?

That's boring.

Too common.

I think we embrace it.
Become more aware of it.

Thinking is simulation.