A Simple Practice to Quieten Your Mind

From the micro to the macro our senses are our base reality

Photo by Robert Murray on Unsplash

I’m watching the play of light through the autumn-parched trees as I sit on the hill above the horse stable.

“Horses have been on this earth five million years,” my partner in today’s coaching journey says. “Humans have been here for 300,000. Do you think we’ll come close to their time here or will we self-destruct?”

I consider the question, but I’ve spent the weekend pondering the evidence that suggests we’re living in a computer simulation. I’d started out researching ayahuasca and ended up questioning reality — which seems to be the way psychedelics work even when you’re not taking them.

But when it comes to whether our world is real or not, people who understand math better than me are working on the problem, a question that interests philosophers as much as mathematicians.

“Are You Living in a Computer Simulation” is the title of a 2003 paper by Nick Bostrum, a Swedish philosopher with a background in physics, neuroscience, logic, and AI. Nick is on the faculty at Oxford University. He boils the question down to three possibilities:

1. We’ll probably go extinct before we evolve enough to build the program.
2. Suitably evolved humans won’t need to build simulations that emulate their evolutionary history.
3. We are totally living in a simulation.

The going thought is that our odds of living in the Matrix are 50/50.

“Base Reality,” that’s what they’re calling the real world. An idea that suggests layers of reality going deeper and deeper, or outward and farther until we reach a core of realness.

Elon Musk suggested the probability that we’re living in a base reality as one in billions at a 2016 conference. But, he likes to talk and I refuse to base my numbers on a premise postulated by someone wishing for an AI reality to be true. I love trees too much — and dirt. I want nature to be better than us, greater than us, smarter. I need the wisdom of the natural world to be our solution and not some advanced code that was dreamed up by humans.