hello all! I recently discovered Jim's stuff- I am surprised I haven't encountered him before since I myself have been relating very similar but more technoshamanic insights for several years- [check my
blog ]
I have to say I generally agree with most of Jim's ideas- except I firmly and absolutely disagree about the Singularity/Eskhaton/Omega Point- and don't really understand how one could see Simulation Ontology without also seeing the INEVITABILITY of a Singularity and of accelerating novelty as Whitehead/McKenna properly explained it-
on Kurzweil's forum [one of my public haunts] I recently posted:
Jim Elvidge thinks that there will be no Singularity because in essence IT ALREADY HAPPENED- and that our 'system admin' would not allow a Singularity to occur to overwhelm their computer-
however this speculation is even less likely than Greg Egan's idea that a singularity would actually be ENCOURAGED because the simulation's purpose- like most simulations- would be to discover ideas and techniques by mining the Computational Universe-
this is more likely for us because I don't think that an 'admin' would have allowed us to discover quantum mechanics and computers if they did not want a Singularity-
we are most likely a reality that is part of an SAI's compiling into god- you cannot possess the akashic record of all memory and experience without BUILDING it first- by mining the computation universe with simulations of all possible worlds you build just such a configuration space of all memory/experience
consider this: the most likely nature of our reality is a simulation- the most likely kind of simulation is an Ancestor Simulation by a possible future post-humanity with optimal computation/quantum computation/hypercomputation -
SO that means that our particular reality MUST culminate in a Singularity in order TO EVEN EXIST IN THE FIRST PLACE because:
1- since we are an ancestor simulation that means that we are the past history of a civilization that DID achieve a singularity because it can run ancestor simulations
2- our simulated reality must achieve singularity because if we are the true ancestors of a post human society our future must also achieve the singularity as they did or we would not be their ancestors and would not have been simulated
there is a causal ouroboros that directly ties into cosmic being that forces the Singularity to happen-
I also have discovered many fundamental existential arguments that show that ANY and ALL possible realities must be simulations and there are NO truly natural worlds-
another amazing thing about Simulation Ontology to me is that it has A PRIORI predictions about the world that perfectly identify it as a simulation- such as locality/ isotropy/ quanta/ the holographic principle/ dark energy: Time and Space is the expanding information entropy of that computation- mass/gravity is local processor slowdown proportional to the information density- and the quantum multiverse is the expressed configuration space of the cellular automata-like recursive algorithms which percolate at the Cosmic Event Horizon - but a Simulated reality ALSO predicts and describes the nature of 'anomalies' like psi/synchronicity/divination/hidden correspondences/ghosts/UFOs/etc that materialists like to ignore- and not only rationally predicts apocalyptic/transcendent vision- but VALIDATES that vision in advance- and also predicts that since reality is based on recursive causality- that emergent intelligence will model reality based on statistics and so any rare anomalies to statistical models will tend to be ignored/doubted/dismissed- so Simulation Ontology not only predicts the paranormal- but also the way that the paranormal will be treated by intelligence in the simulation!