Foreward

I now consider this piece to be deprecated. It is superseded by A Map of the Universe (Berger & Rayl 2022). The Map covers the majority of the ideas presented in this piece and does so with greater precision and a much grander scope. For those who have not yet read A Map of the Universe, I recommend you set down this work in favor of the Map. For those who have read the Map, this tangential and admittedly juvenile piece still holds some value. In particular, the distinction between reality based sensory experience and simulation based sensory experience as well as the atypical argument for innovation remain unique ideas. This piece also discusses compression, sensory experience, and the void with a granularity that may help explicate some of what is presented in the Map. Finally, this piece explores some ideas that run orthogonal to the Map such as the role of art and the limits of abstraction. My goal is for this work to stand as a contained tangent to its grander and more rigorous successor, A Map of the Universe. I hope that this work offers the reader insight into boundaries of thought and a compelling argument for why these boundaries of thought must be expanded.



Introduction

Two concepts form the foundation of my argument: boundary of thought and sensory experience. Boundary of thought is the total number of conceptions of the universe one has. Can you conceive of an omnipotent God? Can you conceive of the universe as a simulation? Each additional conception of the universe expands boundary of thought. Sensory experience is the aggregate of all sensory experiences. Every conversation, book, location, physical feeling, and emotional response comprise the sensory experience of an individual. The foundation of this work is the following postulation: sensory experience determines boundary of thought.

The Birth of God

A nomad living during the dawn of civilization spends his youth listening to myths of ancestors who possessed supernatural abilities. One day the nomad is walking across the desert and sees a thunderstorm approaching. He is hit by a gust of wind and feels rain on the warm sand. The nomad struggles to explain the strange event and conceives of an omnipotent being as the only explanation for the phenomenon. In this moment God is born in the mind of the nomad. The nomad makes sense of the thunderstorm in terms of an omnipotent God releasing his anger upon the desert. If the nomad’s childhood had consisted of a rigorous study of the sciences the thunderstorm would be nothing more than a rare meteorological event. However, he conceives of the thunderstorm in terms of a God because his childhood consisted of myths, not scientific lectures. Sensory experience bounds how the nomad can make sense of the world, limiting his explanation of the thunderstorm to a mythical God. Sensory experience also bounds how the nomad can conceive of God. The nomad has never encountered a human, creature, or object that has the ability to bring thunder or rain to the desert, so the omnipotent God that he has conceived of must remain formless. The nomad has no sensory experience with which to picture what an omnipotent God looks like. This is the origin of the modern God. The sensory experiences of the nomad dictate that a God is created in his mind and that this God remain formless. The nomad’s explanation for the universe must match his past sensory experience and explain his current sensory experience. Thus, the nomad is compelled to create God. Sensory experience dictates how the nomad conceives of reality.

The Death of God

Centuries later during the age of enlightenment, a man of science passes through the same desert. The man of science encounters a similar thunderstorm and draws upon his sensory experience of scientific textbooks and university lectures to conceive of the thunderstorm as an interaction between molecules. His sensory experience has bounded his thought so that he may only conceive of the thunderstorm as a meteorological event. He cannot conceive of the thunderstorm as an act of God because for the man of science God died long ago. Science matches his past sensory experiences and explains the universe around him, dictating how the man of science conceives of reality. Contemporaries would be quick to cite the man of science as possessing a more advanced conception of the universe than the nomad. However, the man of science and the nomad possess thought that is equally bounded. When faced by a thunderstorm in the desert both see only one explanation for the phenomenon. One conception of the universe. The sensory experience of the nomad forces him down a path towards God and the sensory experience of the man of science forces him towards science. The thought of the man of science is just as bounded as that of the nomad. Science is the scientist’s God and God is the nomad’s science. This conclusion does not doom humanity to stagnant thought or relativism. One can arrive at the thunderstorm and see multiple paths towards different conceptions of the universe. One towards God, one towards science, and a number of others towards different explanations of the universe. While sensory experience constricts the boundary of thought of the nomad and the man of science, sensory experience is also what permits us to expand boundary of thought.

The Birth of the Simulation

A human of the 21st century grows up enveloped in the world of bits. The sensory experience of the modern human revolves around ones and zeroes, thus we conceive of the universe as a simulation. The simulation matches our sensory experience and explains the world around us. We spend our days looking at computer code and thus conceive of the world as a computer code. Our conception of the universe remains bounded by sensory experience and the simulation is our analog of God. It is human nature to stare out into the void and look for an explanation. We have found God, science, and the simulation not because these are the correct explanations, but because the sensory experience of the moment has taken us towards these conceptions of the universe. God, science, and the simulation are the same, it is only the sensory experience that differs.

The implications of this are the following. One, if we are to advance beyond the bounded thought of our predecessors we must stare out into the void and see paths towards multiple conceptions of the universe. This requires decamping from whichever conception of the universe sensory experience has led us towards. God, science, the simulation, and any other number of explanations must be considered simultaneously. Two, if we want to increase the boundary of our thought we must increase sensory experience. Increasing sensory experience can be done either by consuming previously discovered sensory experience or discovering new sensory experience. The man of science may increase the boundary of his thought by reading religious scripture and conceiving of the universe in terms of God. However, temporal restriction prohibits the nomad from conceiving of the universe in terms of science. In the nomad’s universe the scientific method does not yet exist. The radical transition from the world of myths and God to the scientific method was necessary to conceive of the thunderstorm as a meteorological event. The radical transition from the world of atoms to the world of bits was necessary to conceive of the universe as a simulation. Further innovation is necessary to alter sensory experience and allow us to conceive of the universe in new ways. I have argued that boundaries of thought are determined by sensory experience and that boundaries of thought are not fixed but may be expanded. The next section considers how boundaries of thought may be expanded.

Expanding Boundaries of Thought

This work is written in the age of the simulation, thus the simulation is the form of thought I use to present my ideas. The first postulation of this work is that boundaries of thought are determined by sensory experience. Thus, boundaries of thought may be increased by increasing sensory experience. This can be done through two methods: “reality” based sensory experience and simulation based sensory experience. Reality based experience consists of all human interaction, physical locations, and sensory experiences that occur in the “real” world. Observing the lifestyle of others changes the way that you perceive the universe. Touch, smell, and noise alter our conception of reality. Every human interaction forces you to reconsider your beliefs. Simulation based experience consists of stories, books, films, art, and sensory experiences that design a simulation and allow you to inhabit a created world. Hearing someone’s life story transports you to the world in which they lived and allows you to witness the sensory experiences that they felt. A book does the same, transporting you into a simulated world. There are relative advantages to each form of sensory experience. Reality based sensory experience is potent because it doesn’t suffer from slipping signifiers. The cat you see with your own eyes is filled with detail. You take in the details of its fur and the iridescent glow of its eyes so detailed that a thousand words could not capture its intricacy. The cat you hear about in a story and visualize in your head lacks the same detail and differs from the cat the storyteller witnessed. Undoubtedly the cat I imagine while writing this passage differs drastically from the cat you call to mind when your eyes see the word “cat” on this page. This is the curse of slipping signifiers, and reality based sensory experience does not suffer from this curse. Living a set of sensory experiences expands boundary of thought more than if that same set of sensory experiences had been simulated through a story you were told or a book that you read. Experiencing an event transpire in “reality” is more potent than reading about the same event in a novel or viewing it on a screen. However, the bandwidth for increasing reality based sensory experience is small. Biological constraints limit the quantity of reality based sensory experience that may be consumed. One is limited to only a life’s worth of reality based sensory experience. Simulation based sensory experience does not face limited bandwidth. An entire life’s worth of sensory experience can be contained in the vessel of a novel or story, and there is no limit to how many stories may be consumed in a lifetime. This is the value of art.

Art as a Method for Expanding Boundaries of Thought

Simulation based sensory experience and art are one in the same. Art in this case refers to any expression of human creativity. Painting, storytelling, novels, physics, mathematics, film. Every work of art is a simulation. The artist simulates a reality in their head and presents it to you. Some simulations such as science fiction present a considerable abstraction from reality while others such as a biography or a photo present marginal tweaks to the real world. To further explicate the role of art as a simulation consider the example of a novel. The foundation of a novel is language. Language is nothing more than an expression of sensory experiences in the form of signifiers that point to signifieds. These signifieds are sensory experiences. The cat that we experience in the real world is a sensory experience that we are able to call forth to the minds of others with the signifier “cat”. Hearing the word “cat” allows you to simulate the image of a cat in your head. Compiling thousands of signifiers into a novel allows one to create a detailed simulation for others. The two dimensional words on the page allow one to imagine a three dimensional world in their head. Words in this case serve to transmit a simulation to the mind of the reader. This is not limited to stories or words. An image or painting compresses an entire world into a simulation that can be synthesized by a viewer in seconds. A film does the same in hours. The advantage of simulation based sensory experience is that it can compress vast quantities of sensory experience. The computer is the ultimate instantiation of this process. Every image, every text, all of physics, can be compressed to the size of bits. Compression allows vast quantities of simulation based sensory experience to be consumed in a lifetime, permitting boundary of thought to expand significantly.

The Limits of Art

Art allows us to abstract and compress reality based sensory experience. However, abstractions remain bounded by reality. We have not evolved to decamp from reality entirely. We remain tethered to the real world. The spaceships of science fiction look similar to airplanes and aliens often retain human characteristics and form. Cubism abstracts form, but is ultimately derived from real subject matter. The same limitations imposed by reality are what led the nomad to conceive of a formless God. Computer memory resembles human memory. Neural networks loosely mimic how the human brain learns. These computational abstractions resemble human attributes because we can only conceive of memory and learning in terms of how we function as humans in the real world. We conduct mathematics on eight dimensional number lines and perform computation in higher dimensions that we cannot visualize. However, even these abstractions remain tethered to the three dimensional world we inhabit. Today we perform mathematics with complex numbers, but we cannot get there without the axioms of mathematics which are designed to match sensory experience. The nomad discovers God because it matches and explains his reality based sensory experience. Mathematics is created for the same reason. Even our greatest forms of abstraction remain tied to reality.

Prior sections argue for the importance of expanding boundaries of thought and claim that simulation based sensory experience is a particularly effective method for doing so. Ideally, we would be able to take reality based sensory experience and continually abstract. If continual abstraction was possible then sensory experience could be continually expanded. A painter could take a landscape and paint it first in a realistic style, then an impressionist style, then a cubist style, and so forth until all possible abstractions of the landscape had been explored and sensory experience had been expanded to its greatest extent. We are not able to do this because we cannot continually abstract reality. We can abstract by one or two degrees, but we are unable to wander too far from reality. We can abstract from an airplane to a spaceship, but we cannot abstract past a spaceship to the next object. We can effectively visualize a three dimensional object on a two dimensional piece of paper, but we cannot visualize an eight dimensional object on a two dimensional piece of paper. However, we are once again not doomed to stagnation. We may increase sensory experience by creating new abstractions of reality or altering the sensory experience of reality. The discovery of elementary particles represents a new abstraction of reality that allows us to conceive of the universe in a new manner. The innovation of airplanes represents an alteration to reality based sensory experience and allowed us to conceive of spaceships. The implication of this is that if we are to expand sensory experience and boundary of thought, we must continue to innovate both in the world of reality and of abstraction. Practices that innovate in the space of reality: advancements in computational technology, space flight, and architecture must be pushed. Simultaneously, innovation in the space of abstraction: new artistic styles, complex mathematics, and virtual reality must be advanced. Through innovation we may expand sensory experience, push the frontier of abstraction, and ultimately expand boundaries of thought.

In Conclusion

Thus far I have argued the following: boundary of thought may be expanded by increasing sensory experience and sensory experience may be expanded by innovating in the worlds of reality and abstraction. Following these instructions puts us on the path towards continually expanding boundary of thought, but the question of where this path will take us remains unanswered. Will expanding boundaries of thought eventually lead us to the correct explanation of the universe? How will we know if we have reached the correct explanation? Perhaps we already reached the correct explanation of the universe when we conceived of God or the simulation. It appears that we are doomed to a lack of falsifiability. The atheist scoffs upon religion while those who believe in the simulation scoff upon atheists. Invariably humans of the future will scoff upon the simulation. I conclude with the following remark. It is human nature to stare out into the void and search for an explanation, yet no definitive answer will be found. The Straussian truth is that we do not want to find an answer. The human condition is defined by a search for meaning, and to find it would mean the end of humanity. Just as death subtends all of life and immortality would spell the end of life, the search for meaning subtends the human condition. There exists no great mystery that has been solved. To expand boundary of thought and discover new conceptions of the universe is to allow us to keep asking the question what does it all mean? It is to keep giving us a reason to live.