I asked my girlfriend (well, I should say ex-girlfriend) what she was thinking, a few weeks back, when she was staring into space blankly.

"Nothing," she said.

"Nothing?" I asked.

"Yeah nothing," came the reply, as though this kind of behaviour was perfectly normal.

"You couldn't have been thinking of nothing," I responded, "there's always something going on, even if you were day dreaming."

No, I wasn't thinking of anything," came the reply.

"What?"

"Yeah, it happens all the time."

So there you have it. I've been observing this kind of behaviour for a while now, when she seems to just shut down for long periods.

I can honestly say that I don't think I've ever experienced thinking of nothing. Apart from before I was born, self-awareness and some kind of thought process are always going on. Even with regards to sleeping, I wake up kinda feeling like I've had an experience, or been somewhere.

Sheeit! I've been dating a Non Player Character all this time.

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media underground

it's possible that she wasn't thinking of anything. Not that she is a Zen master, but I'm pretty sure they are able to sort of not think of anything and just be. Or they strive for that at least. It's also possible she was in hypnotic state. It's surprisingly easy to fall into those.

More then likely though, she just didn't care to share her thoughts at the moment. People think lots of wild things and things not so flattering about each other. Best some times to just saying "I wasn't thinking of anything"

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2194223/Hacking-BRAIN-Scientists-reveal-PIN-number-using-cheap-scanner.html

Dude, it only cost £190 ($299).

Yeah Jim, I was trying to be humorous and light-hearted about the subject, but it really got me thinking about the possibility of the amount of NPCs existing in this potentially programmed reality. My problem is that I probably think too much and my brain tends to work overtime on such subjects. If you look around at the general population, however, so many people seem to fit into certain stereotypes, where their behaviour seems almost predictable (dare I say programmed). When I go out for a beer to my local pub, I end up trying to engage people in conversation about the nature of reality, or space exploration, or death (a favourite of mine), and as soon as I open my mouth I am shot down in flames for being either depressing, manically obsessive, or out of my goddamned mind, even though I try and tackle the subject with cynical light-hearted humour.

Then they all go back to watching the football, or talking about football, or celebrities, or some other mindless gibberish that doesn't require much thought process at all. Every so often I bump into someone with whom I can discuss these issues, and usually they are regarded by the masses as mentally unstable also. When that happens, I relish in it, because you can almost feel the levels of discomfort and confusion increase around you.

Ekuma1981, I have on occasion brought up the possibility that if this is a programmed reality then she might be an NPC, and whilst that would probably warrant a hefty slap in the face from any of my previous girlfriends, this one doesn't even seem slightly perturbed by the possibility at all.

Tracy, she ain't no Zen Master. Trust me on that.

On another note altogether - and I should perhaps probably start another thread about this - in the last couple of years I've been experiencing a lot of sleep paralysis. It's happening almost every couple of weeks now, and the experiences leave me feeling as though I'm familiar with some of the scenarios that occur within my dreams - as though some of my dreams are a continuation of something I've experienced before. It's not that these feel like they are a continuation of a previous dream I've had, but I awake from the sleep paralysis (usually forcing myself awake because I get scared) feeling as though the dream events are a continuation of something I've actually experienced in reality. It kinda got me thinking about our past being altered with some kind of software patch, where you wouldn't be aware that your past had been altered. It feels like the sleep paralysis allows me to access erased memories. As the day goes on this feeling diminishes.

Don't worry, I'm not going crazy about this or anything. It's just an interesting thought experiment to me to consider the possibility of this. It's all fascinating to me, and rather enjoyable if I don't let myself get too obsessed about it.

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I think I brought this up once before with you during an interview I sat in on at sittingknow.co.uk a while back...

My observations lead me to consider that maybe the entire universe is a consciousness, or a self-aware organism operating and experiencing itself on different levels of self-awareness, and that the consciousness that we each feel is the same as what the organism feels, but the experiences are different; are individual.

If man has consciousness, then a dog has consciousness.

A rat has consciousness and a fly has consciousness.

A virus has consciousness and an atom has consciousness.

An electron has consciousness and a quark has consciousness and blah blah blah, and so on, and so forth.

Now obviously these consciousnesses are different, primarily in complexity. But that's not to say that in their own limited way they are not experiencing the buzz of some kind of self-awareness.

Imagine how uncomplex the human being would look to the likes of, say, a global mind, or the universe running through all these sequences of different aspects of its consciousness as a whole.

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media underground