I am not sure how often I will do this, but I am going to publish some scrap that I recently wrote. I’ll call these scraps windows as they are a window into what and how I write sometimes. This particular window is from nothing, and it will probably never be used for anything. It was just a thought that was stuck in my mind. You could think of it as a reverse writer’s block. An idea I needed to put somewhere before it would let me write anything important. It could be the backdrop for a story or an insight into a character, but as it stands it’s more than likely just going to end up a scrap in my writing file.

I figure, why not put it to use and throw it on the blog? Perhaps it’s just a cop-out to make this blog easier, but hey, my blog my rules, right? This little window has received very little editing besides just a once-through for spelling, and it was very stream of consciousness, not in style, but in how the idea hits the page. So be gentle, dear reader. Be gentle and enjoy:

I keep coming back to the idea that we are all living in a simulation, or even that maybe just I am living in a simulation. Truman Show feels like it’s riding on my back as of late. The world is starting to seem fake, and our methods for experiencing it are at best imperfect and potentially even invalid. There is a very real probability that nothing that you see or interact with or gain information from is real.

If this were true then you have to accept the fact that there are no certainties. Though we all “know” we will die, it is an uncertainty. Life is an uncertainty. My god does play dice.

There is no way to know anything. The sun really has no reason to rise tomorrow if we are all just bits acting on bits.

What if the universe had a bug? A momentary glitch, maybe even a repeatable. Jump in this one spot just right and cause a temporary and momentary dissipation of the weak atomic force.

Maybe these code bugs are already there and if they are caused by a method of observation how can we know that we are not dealing with spurious data from a bugged output matrix? A particle accelerator creates anti-matter as a glitch, a particle that never existed before. Instead, we make theories about its existence in the early universe. It doesn’t matter whether observation came first or second really. Theories are just theories until they are observed and we used to believe that the Earth was the center of the universe. That was a theory.

What if the earth WAS the center of the universe because that’s what we believed and what made sense, but as our need for more and more answers grew, the universe has had to keep retconning itself including its laws? The earth might have been flat just a few hundred years ago. Until we had Hubble’s eye, galaxies outside of our own mightn’t have existed yet.

Imagine the writer, putting smears in the sky amongst all these pinpoints of light. In the moment, they just want these spots to create a beautiful night sky for their story’s characters, but then, much later, they had to decide what those spots of light were, and eventually even the smears had to be explained. That part of the universe simply wasn’t written yet.

Okay, but what does all this mean? What is it all good for? Should we live life to its fullest? Should we live for our children or the people we share this planet with? I don’t know. But it does make science rather trivial almost, doesn’t it?

Now, I love science. I’m a space and computer nerd who loves to learn and loves exploration and discovery, but maybe that’s my mind just making a game of it. Or maybe, that’s my Truman Show brain literally making the universe around it, moment by moment.

The fact that we think aliens would remotely like us or even in terms we would or could understand seems so assonine. That’s not a word I use lightly. In fact, I don’t think I ever used it. In fact, I spelled it wrong and I am fucking leaving it for the record. Asinine is an asinine way to spell asinine. Maybe there’s an alien that can’t even perceive us. Maybe we can’t perceive them. Maybe they are here right now thinking the whole universe works by entirely different rules and it makes perfect sense to them that they live in a water droplet fizzing through a black void. They could be right next to you right now, hunched under a moltar impressioning memories on the domlix. And maybe, just every once in a while, one violates the emulsion of its blend and that’s why your eye twitched while checking out at the Pig and trying to seem normal in front of another human for one goddamn second.

Quote of the Moment:

“Maybe the only significant difference between a really smart simulation and a human being was the noise they made when you punched them.”

― Terry Pratchett, The Long Earth

Current Reads:

Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson