I’m not a fan of the simulation so-called hypothesis. I can’t deny that it’s possibly true, although it does seem to require a big stack of turtles unless reality is somehow recursive and we’re living in a universe designed by our grandchildren. I admit, however, that I can’t help hoping and almost feeling sometimes that reality is really just a draft. My own life has always seemed like a rehearsal for a performance that may never take place. I used to assume everyone felt this way, but there are those people, possibly most people who can just take life more or less as it is, and maybe I am one of these people without realizing it or maybe everyone is to everyone else, but maybe we actually need to fear missing out in order just to get by, which leads to the sense that the real life is always happening somewhere else and that’s the basis of the illusion that reality has or even needs some kind of kernel, that it’s an exaggeration of some nub of truth, and possibly an interface to a deeper reality, or maybe an outright trick we play on ourselves. Of course part of the problem is that we tend to pull our metaphors out of whatever we happen to be doing at the moment. I’m writing a draft, so the world’s a draft. I think there’s a likely false sense often at the start of a project that if we just acknowledge that our tools may define the problem we’re trying to solve we can somehow get past that to the thing itself, but of course you aren’t reading a draft, but a published blog post. I can change it on the wall like Turner, and I guess I could turn on the comments (haha), so maybe it is kind of a draft at least until I die. What it really is is a kind of shell or exoskeleton. Maybe all of our thoughts are basically lifeless extrusions that we need to live, and that seem to be part of us, but which we shed as a matter of course. Since reality exists for us in our thoughts, perceptions, claims, and questions, it doesn’t seem ridiculous to imagine that it is genuinely provisional and built to be abandoned. I’m reluctant to get into the philosophy of science, although what I’m describing superficially resembles a dumbed down version of the scientific method, but science tends to operate on the assumption that there is some kind of underlying reality to be discovered, although maybe that’s just metaphysical jetsam. Gödel says in a letter to his mom that, “the idea that everything in the world has meaning is, by the way, the exact analogue of the principle that everything has a cause on which the whole of science is based.” I’m not getting into it with the greatest logician since Aristotle, but if we’re permitting arguments by analogy this does make me think of Gödel’s immigration hearing. Einstein apparently had a hard time keeping him from explaining the logical flaws he had found in the US Constitution to the examining magistrate. I’m not sure I see why reality is obliged to make any more sense than the federal system.