Do we live in a simulation?

It is a question that I grapple with often, particularly when I am walking or out in nature, or visiting new places I think about the nature of perception, for what I am seeing and experiencing may be quite different to another person standing next to me. Our eyes don't see, it is our visual cortex at the back of our brains.

So, even at a superficial level, our reality is a simulation by the brain. I have known about how expectation and / or imagination affects perception for some time. Seeing a friends face in that of a stranger, or picking up the wrong flavoured yogurt but tasting the expected flavour than what is actually there until one sees the label and the flavour then changes abruptly, or seeing monsters or beasts in the failing darkness as shadows flicker in torch light. These are all examples that I have experienced. I have also experienced, whilst battling a virus, hallucinations of unnerving realism, of flies swarming a room. Or, having slept in the mosquito filled tropics of my youthful adventure, having returned to the UK, hearing the droning swarm of tropical mosquitoes every time I switched off the bedroom light, because that is what I expected. So, I think in a very basic level yes, reality is a simulation. But is it more like the film The Matrix and / or like being in a computer game? This draws me back to the world of the Shaman and of the different way of “seeing” the world by utilising a different unit of cognition, unavailable to most people. That, and the nature of the mind, and the interaction of the mind in the world around us, is a fascinating mystery to me which piques my Science Fiction tendencies…a child who grew up on Star Wars, no less, and as a teenager found the Psychic abilities of E.E “Doc” Smith’s Lensman most appealing. But whilst the world of the shaman is invisible to us, and to many merely a hallucination or a type of “role playing",  there are other more physical applications which use an unseen force. I speak of the Martial Arts based on eastern philosophies of Chi, or Ki and the Tanden, yet with such profound impact in the physical world. Anyone punched or kicked by a Black Belt knows what I am talking about: it is the mind and body honed like a Samurai Sword. No one questions the spirituality of the martial artist and whilst we may laugh at the New Ager, with their Chi Pathways and Meridians; no one laughs at the Martial Artist in action.

On a separate note who can forget Keanu Reeves in The Matrix..."I know Kung-Fu".

Now, if reality was a simulation, like a computer game, what would we download as our special skill?