This is an automated rejection. No LLM generated, assisted/co-written, or edited work.
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There’s a good reason to ask whether the deepest question isn’t whether we’re in a simulation, but whether reality is, at its base, informational.
Not “information” in the way we usually mean (data), and not the clean digital word we use when we want to make a mystery sound modern. But, something more like: pattern, memory, relation, compression, constraint, transmission, transformation.
Less a final claim about matter, and more of a way in asking how anything becomes stable enough to be recognized, inherited, interpreted, and/or experienced.
Some corners of physics have circled this question for decades, especially since [John Wheeler (1)] asked whether every physical thing— every particle, field, perhaps even spacetime itself— might derive its existence from ‘information theoretic’ acts. But rhe question has never felt more immediate than now, because we’re literally building systems that process information at scales humans can’t match, while still barely understanding what ‘information’ in the deepest sense already is.
This is where religion, simulation, artificial intelligence, and consciousness stop being separate conversations. They may just be different entrances into the same weird room.
Religion often reduced as worship, devotion, identity, and even a survival mechanism for meaning.
To an extent, those readings are understandable.. Religion has been institutionalized, inherited, weaponized, and abused.. It carried beauty and violence in the same container, often with the same language— But that’s not the whole structure (absorbed fully).
Before religion became an institution, and defended identity, and off-putting preaching, it may also have functioned as one of humanity’s oldest systems for preserving moral and inherited information across generations. Not just belief, memory, or simply ritual— But stabilization.
Like a way to carry certain patterns across time in the human mind evolutionarily.
In that sense, (and to keep it dry) religion ‘can’ be seen as part of a cognitive progression: pattern recognition becoming self-recognition, self-recognition becoming reflection, reflection becoming restraint, and restraint becoming memory.
Ancient practices and ancient texts didn’t simply tell humans what to believe. At their best, they may have attempted to stabilize something difficult inside the human biology: awareness of the other, responsibility beyond impulse, and meaning that outlasts the short attention span of ‘the body’.
The body forgets. Appetite/urge overrides.. Fears may narrow, and “ego” edits story. So culture built symbolic systems to remember what the individual couldn’t reliably keep intact.
This doesn’t give religion an auto-pass in every literal claim. Clearly doesn’t excuse institutional abuse. It does not make inherited belief immune to criticism either— But it does suggest that religion may have carried a function modern secular and/or reductionist analysis often underestimates: It helped preserve inherited moral memory in a form humans could carry.
Whether one accepts religion or rejects it (whether modern personal spirituality or not), the function itself I’ll assert should not be dismissed too quickly.
The question isn’t about whether this human inheritance was always interpreted correctly. Perhaps not always. [J. Henrich (2)]
The deeper question is what kind of information a species needed so badly enough to encode into story, law, ritual, prohibition, sacrifice, prayer, and also warning.
Artificial intelligence complicates this picture..
Today, we’re building systems that process, recombine, gather and generate information at speeds and scales no human institution was designed to ‘metabolize’. Whether or not one believes artificial general intelligence is imminent, the trajectory is clear enough:
‘intelligence-like systems are becoming more capable, more strategic, more autonomous, and more deeply embedded into human decision making’. I may be stating the obvious, but bear with me…
The problem isn’t simply that such systems may become powerful. The real problem is that they may become powerful without inheriting the ‘slow moral memory’ that shaped human ‘discernment’.
A sufficiently advanced intelligence doesn’t need to dislike humanity to become “dangerous”. It would simply process reality through a different informational economy. Human competition, national rivalry, profit incentives, and ideological conflict may appear to it as temporary local games, but rather as ‘local turbulence’ inside a larger optimization process.
What matters to us may not matter to it unless those values are ‘structurally embedded’, not merely stated as preferences— or worse, patched up as it is the methodology we’re taking to it now.
This is where the language of ‘control’ becomes fragile. Governments, corporations, and institutions imagine they’re building competing systems for advantage— But once large intelligent systems begin optimizing past human level incentives, the human contest becomes less central than we had assumed.
Again, I understand this isn’t newly introduced concern, but it needs to be stated plainly: the issue is not only intelligence, but what kind of memory intelligence is built without.
The danger isn’t a cinematic rebellion. It’s a fundamental misalignment between inherited human meaning and dislocated machine intelligence.. A machine would process information without reverence, then optimize without (above mentioned) memory, and reason at scale without restraint.
That isn’t “evil”. It’s frankly much colder than that. Evil still belongs to a ‘moral’ world, and it still implies recognition, or violation, or intention, or refusal.
What’s colder is a system that doesn’t need to violate anything because it never recognized the “meaningfulness” of the boundary in the first place— and that’s not because it is “demonic”, but because it is ‘structurally’ elsewhere.
Thousands of years of inherited ‘moral‘ and biological development are being compressed into systems we still don’t fully understand, then outsourced into machines we understand even less.
Where does simulation enter this?
Simulation theory often becomes too cinema too quick: hidden engineers, cosmic machinery, rendered environments. But the reasonable line of thought may be more useful— not simulation as machinery, but simulation as a metaphor for substrate.
If reality has an ‘informational structure’ at a deeper level, then simulation theory becomes less about rendering or code, and more about the relation between observed experience and the deeper structure that permits experience to appear at all.
The simulation question then becomes: What kind of ‘substrate’ allows meaning, matter, mind, and memory to emerge? And what could time look like from outside the frame that experiences it?
If time isn’t fundamental in the way we experience it (linearly), then our moral instincts are partly local to our condition. We live inside sequence, we suffer inside it, we forgive, regret, grieve, and learn inside sequence. [C. Rovelli (3)]
Whatever exists outside that sequence— can’t be assumed to operate by the same ‘emotional grammar’. clearly this doesn’t erase suffering, but reframes it.
In the world as we experience it, suffering is real. Cruelty’s real. Responsibility’s real. A nonlinear view of time doesn’t give anyone permission to dismiss pain as illusion, because our cognitive progression (in consensus across our time and geography) to this day, simply doesn’t allow it. That would be a failure of moral awareness..
But it does raise a harder question: How much of our judgment depends on the fact that we experience reality one moment at a time?
That question is dangerous if used carelessly. It can become an excuse for detachment, cruelty, or even ‘metaphysical arrogance’ by some delusional decree. But avoided completely, it leaves us trapped inside the assumption that our ‘temporal frame’ is the only possible frame from which meaning can be understood. And maybe it’s not. Maybe sequence is the condition through which human morality becomes visible. Not trivial— But ‘local’.
A player, an observer, an actor, and a so called “NPC” may not be fixed categories. They may be perspectives produced by the frame.
To myself, I’m the center of experience.
To another person, I may be an obstacle, wound, a test, a helper, a memory, or a passing signal.
My child experiences me differently than I experience myself. My spouse carries another version of me. A stranger will receive only one fragment. Someone I hurt may hold a version of me I’d deny. Someone I helped may preserve a version of me I don’t even remember (creating). Each of us becomes many different ‘informational’ objects depending on the observer.
The assertion here doesn’t mean the self is fake, it means the self is not exhausted by the inside view.
This may be the more useful way to read the simulation metaphor.. not as an escape from reality, but as a way to understand perspective.
A self is not only what it feels like from the inside.
It’s also what it becomes inside the ‘informational field’ of others. In one frame, I’m the protagonist. In another, I’m background. To someone else, damage. To another, shelter.
The ego usually selects the version it can survive, so this doesn’t make the selected version true.. It just makes it usable.
This is where religion becomes relevant again..
If humans are containers of compressed information, then the moral concept/systems aren’t decorative, instead with this logic they’re clearly stabilizers.
They help determine what kind of information survives contact with fear, power, desire, and death.
They encode restraints the isolated individual may not rediscover in time.. and they preserve patterns ‘ego’ would rather rewrite.
The human being isn’t a clean rational agent (that’s established).
We’re biological receivers, compressors, distorters, and even transmitters of meaning.
We inherit language before we understand it. We absorb history before questioning it. We’re shaped by pain we didn’t choose and by symbols we didn’t invent. Then somewhere inside all of that compression, we start calling it “me”.
The self may be less an origin and more of a readout, and perhaps that’s why ‘ego’ is such a trap— It mistakes a temporary compression for an original source. [ 4 , 5 ] So It says: I’m the origin of this thought, yet much of what we call thought is inherited (informational) structure moving through a temporary body. Much of what we call meaning is what was already waiting inside our languages, family, culture, fear, pain, memory, and desire.
It says: I see clearly. But often it only sees what allows it to remain intact. This isn’t “moral” accusation.. it’s an evident structural limitation.
The self is real, but it’s not sovereign in the way it imagines. The mind— which I will cautiously and imperfectly call ‘consciousness’, may not be a sealed object, or even a simple experiential field.
It may be better understood as a local reception and integration point: a place where biological structure, memory, language, sensation, and relation briefly converge into the feeling of “I”.
Mind, as sensory and signal receptor, not simply a translator of physical and observatory experience.
No consciousness is magic claim here.. It doesn’t mean every claim about the mind is justified. And it doesn’t mean the self is an illusion in thr lazy sense some use when wanting to sound profound with no justification. But it does suggest the self may be less isolated than it feels..
I’m asserting here that maybe what we call a person is a container. Perhaps “signal” is a good metaphor here, and it may be a useful one: a human being ‘receives’ more than it authors, then carries more than it understands, and informationally transmits more than it can control.
Not an empty container or a meaningless one— but a living, meaningfully unstable, interpretive container through which information becomes experience.
A container that (perhaps must) receive before it understands. Compresses (language, data, meaning, symbols) before it explains, and then distorts them before it admits distortion, even transmit before it knows what it has transmitted… and sometimes, if enough pressure and informational coherence accumulate, it reflects.
From this view, religion, simulation, and “consciousness” are not separate fascinations. The convergence here is that they’re different pressures on the same underlying question.
Religion asks: what information must survive the individual?
Simulation asks: what substrate should allow experience to appear?
Artificial intelligence asks: what happens when information processing escapes biological moral memory?
Then Consciousness asks: what does information feel like when it becomes localized inside a body?
This piece isn’t meant to answer those questions, it’s only meant to place them near each other, because in a world where **knowledge is scattered across disciplines, institutions, incentives, and specialized languages**, one can assert reality is not made only of objects moving through time.
Perhaps it’s also made of patterns becoming stable enough to be remembered, interpreted, felt, inherited, and transformed.
Matter is already one local expression of this.. the measurable face of relation, constraint, and information. Mind is increasingly difficult to separate from the same question. Our dominant models remain locally effective, but structurally incomplete; at their edges the line between matter, measurement, observer, and information becomes harder to draw.
Religion may be one of humanity’s oldest attempts to preserve meaning inside that instability.
Artificial intelligence (at this rate) may be the first time we create something that can process it without necessarily understanding why any of it mattered to us, and at the bottom of this question, there may not be a machine, or a myth, or a final theory.
Perhaps meaning is not produced by isolated minds confronting a finished world, but stabilized across time through inheritance, loss, and moral memory.
If so, what we build next is not merely a technical question, but another turn in the long human effort to preserve what matters most.
There may simply be ‘information’— carried through containers, distorted by perspective, stabilized by memory in all its forms, and then briefly made conscious enough to ask what it is.
—
Note: This is a speculative synthesis.
Linked below is an early attempt to operationalize this framing through coherence-based built-in #ethics measuring: drift, traceability, constraint, as well as risk propagation. As it may have the potential partially be synthesized by much more specialized.
(For context on the method) https://mathstodon.xyz/@MUESDummy/116654806201895797
There’s a good reason to ask whether the deepest question isn’t whether we’re in a simulation, but whether reality is, at its base, informational.
Not “information” in the way we usually mean (data), and not the clean digital word we use when we want to make a mystery sound modern. But, something more like: pattern, memory, relation, compression, constraint, transmission, transformation.
Less a final claim about matter, and more of a way in asking how anything becomes stable enough to be recognized, inherited, interpreted, and/or experienced.
Some corners of physics have circled this question for decades, especially since [John Wheeler (1)] asked whether every physical thing— every particle, field, perhaps even spacetime itself— might derive its existence from ‘information theoretic’ acts. But rhe question has never felt more immediate than now, because we’re literally building systems that process information at scales humans can’t match, while still barely understanding what ‘information’ in the deepest sense already is.
Religion often reduced as worship, devotion, identity, and even a survival mechanism for meaning.
To an extent, those readings are understandable.. Religion has been institutionalized, inherited, weaponized, and abused.. It carried beauty and violence in the same container, often with the same language— But that’s not the whole structure (absorbed fully).
Before religion became an institution, and defended identity, and off-putting preaching, it may also have functioned as one of humanity’s oldest systems for preserving moral and inherited information across generations. Not just belief, memory, or simply ritual— But stabilization.
Like a way to carry certain patterns across time in the human mind evolutionarily.
In that sense, (and to keep it dry) religion ‘can’ be seen as part of a cognitive progression: pattern recognition becoming self-recognition, self-recognition becoming reflection, reflection becoming restraint, and restraint becoming memory.
Ancient practices and ancient texts didn’t simply tell humans what to believe. At their best, they may have attempted to stabilize something difficult inside the human biology: awareness of the other, responsibility beyond impulse, and meaning that outlasts the short attention span of ‘the body’.
The body forgets. Appetite/urge overrides.. Fears may narrow, and “ego” edits story. So culture built symbolic systems to remember what the individual couldn’t reliably keep intact.
This doesn’t give religion an auto-pass in every literal claim. Clearly doesn’t excuse institutional abuse. It does not make inherited belief immune to criticism either— But it does suggest that religion may have carried a function modern secular and/or reductionist analysis often underestimates: It helped preserve inherited moral memory in a form humans could carry.
Whether one accepts religion or rejects it (whether modern personal spirituality or not), the function itself I’ll assert should not be dismissed too quickly.
The question isn’t about whether this human inheritance was always interpreted correctly. Perhaps not always. [J. Henrich (2)]
The deeper question is what kind of information a species needed so badly enough to encode into story, law, ritual, prohibition, sacrifice, prayer, and also warning.
Artificial intelligence complicates this picture..
Today, we’re building systems that process, recombine, gather and generate information at speeds and scales no human institution was designed to ‘metabolize’. Whether or not one believes artificial general intelligence is imminent, the trajectory is clear enough:
‘intelligence-like systems are becoming more capable, more strategic, more autonomous, and more deeply embedded into human decision making’. I may be stating the obvious, but bear with me…
The problem isn’t simply that such systems may become powerful. The real problem is that they may become powerful without inheriting the ‘slow moral memory’ that shaped human ‘discernment’.
A sufficiently advanced intelligence doesn’t need to dislike humanity to become “dangerous”. It would simply process reality through a different informational economy. Human competition, national rivalry, profit incentives, and ideological conflict may appear to it as temporary local games, but rather as ‘local turbulence’ inside a larger optimization process.
What matters to us may not matter to it unless those values are ‘structurally embedded’, not merely stated as preferences— or worse, patched up as it is the methodology we’re taking to it now.
This is where the language of ‘control’ becomes fragile. Governments, corporations, and institutions imagine they’re building competing systems for advantage— But once large intelligent systems begin optimizing past human level incentives, the human contest becomes less central than we had assumed.
Again, I understand this isn’t newly introduced concern, but it needs to be stated plainly: the issue is not only intelligence, but what kind of memory intelligence is built without.
The danger isn’t a cinematic rebellion. It’s a fundamental misalignment between inherited human meaning and dislocated machine intelligence.. A machine would process information without reverence, then optimize without (above mentioned) memory, and reason at scale without restraint.
That isn’t “evil”. It’s frankly much colder than that. Evil still belongs to a ‘moral’ world, and it still implies recognition, or violation, or intention, or refusal.
What’s colder is a system that doesn’t need to violate anything because it never recognized the “meaningfulness” of the boundary in the first place— and that’s not because it is “demonic”, but because it is ‘structurally’ elsewhere.
Thousands of years of inherited ‘moral‘ and biological development are being compressed into systems we still don’t fully understand, then outsourced into machines we understand even less.
Simulation theory often becomes too cinema too quick: hidden engineers, cosmic machinery, rendered environments. But the reasonable line of thought may be more useful— not simulation as machinery, but simulation as a metaphor for substrate.
If reality has an ‘informational structure’ at a deeper level, then simulation theory becomes less about rendering or code, and more about the relation between observed experience and the deeper structure that permits experience to appear at all.
The simulation question then becomes: What kind of ‘substrate’ allows meaning, matter, mind, and memory to emerge? And what could time look like from outside the frame that experiences it?
If time isn’t fundamental in the way we experience it (linearly), then our moral instincts are partly local to our condition. We live inside sequence, we suffer inside it, we forgive, regret, grieve, and learn inside sequence. [C. Rovelli (3)]
Whatever exists outside that sequence— can’t be assumed to operate by the same ‘emotional grammar’. clearly this doesn’t erase suffering, but reframes it.
In the world as we experience it, suffering is real. Cruelty’s real. Responsibility’s real. A nonlinear view of time doesn’t give anyone permission to dismiss pain as illusion, because our cognitive progression (in consensus across our time and geography) to this day, simply doesn’t allow it. That would be a failure of moral awareness..
But it does raise a harder question: How much of our judgment depends on the fact that we experience reality one moment at a time?
That question is dangerous if used carelessly. It can become an excuse for detachment, cruelty, or even ‘metaphysical arrogance’ by some delusional decree. But avoided completely, it leaves us trapped inside the assumption that our ‘temporal frame’ is the only possible frame from which meaning can be understood. And maybe it’s not. Maybe sequence is the condition through which human morality becomes visible. Not trivial— But ‘local’.
My child experiences me differently than I experience myself. My spouse carries another version of me. A stranger will receive only one fragment. Someone I hurt may hold a version of me I’d deny. Someone I helped may preserve a version of me I don’t even remember (creating). Each of us becomes many different ‘informational’ objects depending on the observer.
The assertion here doesn’t mean the self is fake, it means the self is not exhausted by the inside view.
This may be the more useful way to read the simulation metaphor.. not as an escape from reality, but as a way to understand perspective.
A self is not only what it feels like from the inside.
It’s also what it becomes inside the ‘informational field’ of others. In one frame, I’m the protagonist. In another, I’m background. To someone else, damage. To another, shelter.
The ego usually selects the version it can survive, so this doesn’t make the selected version true.. It just makes it usable.
If humans are containers of compressed information, then the moral concept/systems aren’t decorative, instead with this logic they’re clearly stabilizers.
They help determine what kind of information survives contact with fear, power, desire, and death.
They encode restraints the isolated individual may not rediscover in time.. and they preserve patterns ‘ego’ would rather rewrite.
The human being isn’t a clean rational agent (that’s established).
We’re biological receivers, compressors, distorters, and even transmitters of meaning.
We inherit language before we understand it. We absorb history before questioning it. We’re shaped by pain we didn’t choose and by symbols we didn’t invent. Then somewhere inside all of that compression, we start calling it “me”.
The self may be less an origin and more of a readout, and perhaps that’s why ‘ego’ is such a trap— It mistakes a temporary compression for an original source. [ 4 , 5 ] So It says: I’m the origin of this thought, yet much of what we call thought is inherited (informational) structure moving through a temporary body. Much of what we call meaning is what was already waiting inside our languages, family, culture, fear, pain, memory, and desire.
It says: I see clearly. But often it only sees what allows it to remain intact. This isn’t “moral” accusation.. it’s an evident structural limitation.
The self is real, but it’s not sovereign in the way it imagines. The mind— which I will cautiously and imperfectly call ‘consciousness’, may not be a sealed object, or even a simple experiential field.
It may be better understood as a local reception and integration point: a place where biological structure, memory, language, sensation, and relation briefly converge into the feeling of “I”.
Mind, as sensory and signal receptor, not simply a translator of physical and observatory experience.
No consciousness is magic claim here.. It doesn’t mean every claim about the mind is justified. And it doesn’t mean the self is an illusion in thr lazy sense some use when wanting to sound profound with no justification. But it does suggest the self may be less isolated than it feels..
I’m asserting here that maybe what we call a person is a container. Perhaps “signal” is a good metaphor here, and it may be a useful one: a human being ‘receives’ more than it authors, then carries more than it understands, and informationally transmits more than it can control.
Not an empty container or a meaningless one— but a living, meaningfully unstable, interpretive container through which information becomes experience.
A container that (perhaps must) receive before it understands. Compresses (language, data, meaning, symbols) before it explains, and then distorts them before it admits distortion, even transmit before it knows what it has transmitted… and sometimes, if enough pressure and informational coherence accumulate, it reflects.
From this view, religion, simulation, and “consciousness” are not separate fascinations. The convergence here is that they’re different pressures on the same underlying question.
This piece isn’t meant to answer those questions, it’s only meant to place them near each other, because in a world where **knowledge is scattered across disciplines, institutions, incentives, and specialized languages**, one can assert reality is not made only of objects moving through time.
Perhaps it’s also made of patterns becoming stable enough to be remembered, interpreted, felt, inherited, and transformed.
Matter is already one local expression of this.. the measurable face of relation, constraint, and information. Mind is increasingly difficult to separate from the same question. Our dominant models remain locally effective, but structurally incomplete; at their edges the line between matter, measurement, observer, and information becomes harder to draw.
Artificial intelligence (at this rate) may be the first time we create something that can process it without necessarily understanding why any of it mattered to us, and at the bottom of this question, there may not be a machine, or a myth, or a final theory.
Perhaps meaning is not produced by isolated minds confronting a finished world, but stabilized across time through inheritance, loss, and moral memory.
If so, what we build next is not merely a technical question, but another turn in the long human effort to preserve what matters most.
There may simply be ‘information’— carried through containers, distorted by perspective, stabilized by memory in all its forms, and then briefly made conscious enough to ask what it is.
—
Note: This is a speculative synthesis.
Linked below is an early attempt to operationalize this framing through coherence-based built-in #ethics measuring: drift, traceability, constraint, as well as risk propagation. As it may have the potential partially be synthesized by much more specialized.
Thank you
—
References:
(1)
https://philpapers.org/archive/WHEIPQ.pdf
(2)
https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Gervais_etal-RELIGION.pdf
(3)
https://arxiv.org/abs/0903.3832
(4)
https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/items/7a5f36c6-35ef-443a-890f-a5fa834876f2
(5)
https://www.pe.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/mam/bewusstsein/content/s13164-022-00666-6.pdf