MPJ

Let me answer with what I think right away. To me, this is not one of those yes or no questions because it's impossible to tell. Simply put, the theory behind the question is most likely unprovable. Not from the within anyway. 'Simulation Hypothesis' and the phrase 'Non Playable Characters' are concept relatively new, born not that long ago, when digital computing came to be fast enough to produce graphically demanding multi-player games sophisticated enough to hint this question and probability that we might also be inside one of those simulations. And to dispute the question about the nature of reality is quite useless, because everything that surrounds us, no matter how strange we think it is, can also be real and not part of the code. Even if our reality was simulated, its origin would be extremely difficult, if not impossible to prove. By design, nothing inside the simulation could be able to see the lines of the code, only the outcome of its work. In order to say that we are all NPCs, something extraordinary has to happen. Something unexpected, like a bug in the code. A glitch that would clearly break the laws of the physics.


On the other end, in the future, near or far, the engine behind simulated characters in games would be even more sophisticated in a way that all characters will be able to easily pass the Turing's test. To act just like you and me. The AI behind them would be so advanced that they will be equal to the human players. Or much better. So to speak, one game in particular, already achieved this goal. The Chess. When asked about chess engines, Magnus Carlsen, the current world champion, said exactly this: "I find it much more interesting to play humans. And also, of course, now that they have become so strong in a game like that, I wouldn't stand a chance". I love chess, but I have to admit I disagree with Magnus - playing against computer bots became more and more indistinguishable to playing real people. In the most popular chess.com engine online, I solely play against computer personalities behind Komodo and Stockfish engines and I enjoy them for years. But I agree that playing against humans is much more fun. For now. Let's revive this talk again in a decade or two... Or three.. When chess bots develop more to their personalities. More non-chess features. A sense for a humor maybe.

In any case, the main problem with simulation theory is that it lacks a definition of reality itself. What it really is. Is this what we are living in? If it is simulated, where is it simulated from? If we skip all the philosophical views so far solely based on Nick Bostrom book 'Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?' and stay to the physics realm only, I think that simulation of any reality or anything at all requires two prerequisite conditions to start with. One is that there is a high probability that the system performing the simulation should be distinct from its simulation and the second is a large complexity behind, something what Jonathan Bartlett from the Blyth Institute explained with: "The problem with that [simulation in general] is that it always takes more stuff to simulate something than the thing you’re simulating".


Additionally, we are, kind of, looking to the simulation hypothesis through the gaming lenses today, in which simulated reality must have 'real' players from the original coders reality. But what if our reality, if being simulated, is not a multi-player game. What if it is a zero-player game? Or not a game at all? In that case, we all could be NPCs and there would be no real players. Because original and simulated reality could be two completely incompatible actualities. What if simulated reality is not a computer program at all? What if it is something else entirely?

I know I post a lot of questions here, but bear with me. If we follow the logic of more complex, upper reality which is distinct enough from its simulated creation, what would I think of first? For me, it's shadows in Plato's 'Allegory of the cave'. In his famous work, Plato describes a group of people who are chained to the cave facing a blank wall. All they see were shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them. The shadows are the prisoners' entire reality, while the objects before the fire represent the true forms of the items that they can only perceive through reason. Plato goes further elaborating his mind experiment but for our topic let's focus on the shadows themselves. They are just two dimensional images of something coming from the upper third dimension. They are distinct from the original objects and certainly, less complex and the product of a comprehensive setup.


Well, the final question arises by itself. Is it possible to cast three-dimensional shadows of four-dimensional objects? Just like a square represents a cube from the third dimension, the cube could be just a shadow of a tesseract, it's fourth dimensional counterpart. The casting in this scenario would not be as simple as in Plato's story, nor the shadows would be what we mean by the term, but it's definitely something worth giving a second thought. One hypothetical four dimensional reality would be ideal source of three-dimensional simulations and there's even a scientific theory that 'casts' a light in the right direction. It's called the 'Holographic principle'.

The origin of the theory lies in black holes and the best is to quate my fictional self from the 'Revelation of Life', a hard science short story I wrote couple of years ago: "If Hawking was right, any black hole no matter how massive would evaporate over time. When that happens all the information swallowed inside would be lost. The problem is that quantum dynamics is clear about it - nothing, especially information, can ever be lost". The solution to this paradox is that the information belonging to the objects swallowed by the black hole should not be part of the three-dimensional reality in the first place. Holographic principle states that "the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a boundary to the region" or the dimensional boundary surrounding entire universe while our familiar space-time continuum might be just a (holographic) projection of the entities and events located outside.


Finally, and to get back to the original titled question, in this reflection we indeed could be all NPCs in a hypothetical simulation originated from upper dimension. Just like in a famous Zero-Player game invented by John Horton Conway, mathematician from Princeton University, a simulated three-dimensional world can only be a setup, created with an initial state and left to evolve on its own. Just like we culture bacterial colonies in a Petri dish. Or it can be a more complex setup with added life forms driven by conscious artificial entities or even by 'real' people from the upper dimension. For the question why would such simulation be created in the first place, there is no good answer. The reality of a fourth (or fifth, sixth, etc) dimension would be something we couldn't be able to fathom right away. Or at all. Nevertheless I though about one simple reason and embedded it in the 'Revelation of Life', but if you are eager to read it, please watch a 'Game of Life' first, a short film that precedes it.

Game of Life (Simulation story, prequel)
https://www.mpj.one/2016/08/game-of-life.html

Revelation of Life (Simulation story, a hard science fiction)
https://www.mpj.one/2020/10/revelation-of-life-part-one.html

Refs:
https://builtin.com/hardware/simulation-theory
https://mindmatters.ai/2021/01/jonathan-bartlett-on-why-we-do-not-live-in-a-simulated-universe/
https://chesspulse.com/is-magnus-carlsen-better-than-a-computer-2/
https://www.chess.com/terms/chess-engine
https://medium.com/@jacksimmonds89/are-you-an-npc-this-may-disturb-you
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle

Image ref:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/

I was no more than four years old when our car got stuck on a snowy hill decades ago. Everyone but me went outside to push to get us out of frozen road. More people gathered from other cars to help each other and soon everyone was engaged in a small rescue operation. That certainly didn't mean I didn't help - as well as others pushing the car from the outside, I did the same from the inside. From the back seat, I put my hands on the front and pushed hard. In my defense, deep down I knew that what I was doing was kind of weird and useless. At the time I just didn't know why. I was just ashamed sitting alone and doing nothing. Well, like they say, with age comes the wisdom and now I know that what I did was physically impossible, just like in the case of baron Münchhausen - when he got out himself and his horse he was sitting on out of a swamp by pulling his own hair upwards. And just like in old expression about an absurd and impossible thing one can do - if I were to pull bootstraps on my shoes up, lift myself into the air and jump over the fence.

In science fiction, the word bootstrap is also used to portray the impossible task in all the paradoxes that are always hard to understand. Within time travel, the bootstrap paradox is a theoretical paradox that occurs when an object, information or human is sent back in time and becomes trapped in the infinite cause-effect loop in which it no longer has a detectable point of origin. For a simple example, if I somehow send a copy of this very blog post to my younger self before I write it in the first place, the origin of the text becomes utterly unknown. It exists in the time loop and I become just somebody who typed it in. Yet, the text will still have my own style of writing and my own thoughts written down and not somebody else's. Hopefully, you will not find this case implicitly weird, because weird in this blog post, is yet to come.


I was aware of existence of the Netflix's 'Dark' for a long time now, but due to it's scientific background and complexity, I knew it required continuous binging time to watch it and last weekend I finally decided the time is just right, and I swallowed all three seasons in just three days. Like no other TV show it was solely based on time travel and quantum superposition, and... in a word it was outstanding. With lots of characters to follow through both space and time, it did require full concentration, but thankfully due to fantastic direction, script and performances of all involved it was more than understandable and enjoyable, to say the least. It is impossible to continue this without spoilers, so if you are eager to watch it first, this is the point on this blog post to stop reading and I advise it strongly.

Anyhow, Dark's premise is all about bootstrap paradoxes. There are multiple plotlines in the show heavily embedded in time loops, just like my example of this blog post traveling to the past. If that was weird, imagine what this kind of paradox, involving time travel of real people and their intertwined stories, could do to your sanity only as an observer. On top of that, season one passed with very few or not at all special effects and there was no reason for that either. In Dark, all the post-time-travel effects are already embedded in the future, or the present from where they traveled back in time. For example, Helge already had all visible face scars that were consequence of the Urlich's time travel. Also, the stories about murdered woman on the bottom of the lake were already socially spread even before Katharina was murdered in her own time travel.

It was commonly believed that ancient hunter-gatherers, both Humans and Neanderthals, had a simple lifestyle in which most or all of their food was obtained by gathering from local sources or by hunting animals from their environment. We simply assumed that beside the meat they hunted, their diet consisted of only raw foods such as wild plants, edible insects, mushrooms, honey, or pretty much anything that was safe to eat. Well, according to the recent study performed by Ceren Kabukcu* and her team from the archaeobotanical department of the University of Liverpool, we couldn't be more wrong.

It's amazing how different people react to the same thing. Consider the famous question "Is the glass half empty or half full?". What do you see inside such glass when you spot it on the table? The water or the air? This is of course not a school-grade-sort of a question. Actually, there is no right or wrong answer here. There's no definite reason to consider anyone thinking that the glass is half full to be overly optimistic or those who see the emptiness of the glass to be unreasonably realistic. It is just a point of view and nothing more. But, it tells a bit about your character or how Carl Jung, a well known Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst defined it - your personality type.

The point of inquiries like this one is simply in the fact that if we ask ourselves enough questions they would have potential to unveil our personality type fully, or to the high degree of accuracy. However, we would need to be careful in both, selecting the questions and defining all resulting personality types. There are numerous personality tests within psychology and of those based to Carl Jung's study, the most comprehensive is a Myers–Briggs Type Indicator, which assigns you a value from four categories: introversion or extraversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving. One letter from each category is producing a four-letter test result. For example if your test is resulting in a dominance of introversion combined with intuition while you are basically a thinking person with perceiving feat, you would be assigned a "INTP" personality type.


Perhaps, the most of the psychology, in relation to personality types are based on Jung's "Analytical Psychology", the phrase he coined in 1912 when he published "Psychology of the Unconscious", his breakthrough study, that firstly associates to his split up with Sigmund Freud after six years of collaborating in the field. In this book, he established for the first time, his new theory focused on the collective unconscious instead of Freud's conception of libido and the importance of sexual development. When he first read it, Freud muttered the word "heresy" and felt that Jung had "lost his way" from that point on. Perhaps, just like with the 'glass half filled or half empty' this dispute between the two extraordinary men from the history of Psychology, has no definite winner or looser. They might be both right depending on the point of view. After all, the human mind is driven by a still mysterious engine we are keep trying to fully understand.

However, what's interesting in regards to the Freud-Jung dispute, it's what Jung said some years after the split up. According to Jung, the main difference between him and Freud was their personality types being introvert and extravert respectively. Their attitude types were pretty much opposite as the first type persuaded by the voice of their inner self while the second finds their interest inexorably drawn to external things. In his book 'Psychological Types', published in 1921, he said that "since we all swerve rather more towards one side or the other, we naturally tend to understand everything in terms of our own type".


But, if we get back to the personality test, the most obvious questions is what would it's application be? Other than in medical/psychiatric practice, I mean. Of course, we all know ourselves well, so there's no point of some test telling us what we really are. We already know that. If you are a friend with somebody for a long time, surely, there is no need for any test to tell you the obvious about what you already learned about your friend from the experience. Clearly, and maybe the only use of such test would be to learn about personality of someone who you don't really know well. However, the test by it's nature is extremely personal and it naturally raises a wave of privacy issues which are in most countries protected by the law especially after previous decades of the expansion of the internet.

Keeping in mind everything we know so far, what's left and where one such test could be more than useful is, no doubt, all kind of business environments. The offices are by definition filled with lots of colleagues and the adventage of knowing everyone's personality type would benefit the communication between people and enhance productivity significantly. Providing, of course, that employers and employees are fine with sharing their personality test results with each other.


Finally, at the end, we come to the titled personality test that was created exclusively as a business application. Based on Dr. Yolanda Jacobi's interpretation of Carl Jung's theory of psychological type, along with other theories from the Psychology, 'Insights Discovery' is a simple and accessible four color model designed to better understand ourselves and others. If you check the above picture, the basic colors are divided between introversion/extraversion (vertically) and thinking/feeling (horizontally). The test itself is a 25-frame questionnaire of 100 word pairs, which when completed produces the Insights Discovery Personal Profile. Of course, no person is entirely described by one of the colors alone. After all, we are all a mix of different traits that we display differently based on different occasion, environment, mood, etc. Hence, Insight Discovery offers a total of eight personality types, which are shown in center circle with a four more types which represent a blend of two colors.

Please find more details in the references below as I won't go deeper into the science behind 'Insights Discovery' than this. However, if you decide to take the test you will get a result printed in details explaining your personality type on more than 20 pages where you can find your key strengths but also potential weaknesses along with healthy tips for communication between types for both you and the others. What you also will get is a nice little colored Lego-like bricks which represents your colors. If assembled right, it shows your exact place on the Insights Discovery wheel, and it can do it for the both of your conscious and less conscious position.

This little one below is mine.

More than two hundred years passed after Thomas Young performed the famous double-slit experiment as a demonstration of the wave behavior of visible light and still it's revelation puzzles our sanity ever since. In short, if we shoot a beam of light at a panel with two small slits (less than a millimeter apart), the photons - elementary particles that light is made of, have to figure out how to get through the slits to radiate out the other side. If they are truly particles, like in macro world, they would project a solid image of two piles on the background wall behind the slits. If they travel similar to the waves, like water does in macro world, the image would resemble a wave-like interference pattern: alternating locations, equidistantly spaced, where particles leave a mark on the wall.

Thanks to the outcome of the experiment, we know that light is capable to do both. It always travel in wave like fashion, even if we shoot photons in a row towards slits, one after another. Quantum mechanics explanation is that photons are in superposition, meaning they can exist in different states and even multiple places at the same time. The weirdness comes 'only' if we try to tag particles with a pass-through detectors in order to detect which slit they are choosing to go through. At that instant they brake superposition and continue to travel as a macro-objects, just like bullets.


This is very similar to the coin flipping or well-known Schrödinger's cat from the macro world analogy. If we use quantum terminology, these two are in a simple binary superposition, they both have only two outcomes, the coin ending either head or tail or in cat's version being either dead or alive. Superposition in double-slit experiment is way more complex as for the photons being in multiple places at the same time between slits and the detection wall.

However, the weirdness is only present in the quantum level of the micro world and in the case of light in double-slit phenomenon, the puzzle is not the nature of how light travel but rather why it behave the way it does in the moment of being observed? Certainly, it creates profound questions for which we still have no definite answers. The most interesting one is did we find the puzzle here which shows us how nature really works? What is reality behind the engine in quantum world? More important is even the question is this reality objective throughout the universe or it is subjective and created for the observer only?


Let's think about reality problem for the moment first. This behavior of breaking superposition for the sake of observer is very reminiscent of graphically demanding video games in which the reality is never objective - the scenes are always rendered for the gamer sensory inputs - if you play those kind of games and decide to enter a closed room through the door, the room and everything in it doesn't exist at all until you open the door. Only then the CPU starts creating it for you and there's certain superposition of the room and your actions in it which breaks to the only one outcome, depending of what you do.

Now, double-slit is way to complex to test it this way, but binary superposition could be simple enough to create in lab in quantum equivalent and monitor what happens. This is what experiment made by Massimiliano Proietti and his team at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, tried to perform on a small-scale quantum computer made up of three pairs of entangled photons. The idea is to experimentally test Wigner's thought experiment of an observer of the quantum outcome being also observed by second observer. The resulting statements of the two observers is that their interpretations of the outcome contradict each other. The same happens in the lab, with entangled photons in the role of non-conscious observers - the inequality in the data is definitely violated which points in the direction that quantum mechanics might indeed be incompatible with the assumption of objective facts. To put it simply, multiple observers of the same event can have different outcomes as the process in superposition breaks in different patterns. Just like in video games, the reality of the nature could also be subjective and rendered for the observer eyes only.



Strange world of physics at MPJ:
https://www.mpj.one/search/label/physics

Science refs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h75DGO3GrF4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner%27s_friend
https://phys.org/news/2019-11-quantum-physics-reality-doesnt.html
https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05080

It's hard to create a list of all the scientists in the history of mathematics and physics who better applied theoretical knowledge into the hardware that ultimately worked and moved the world to the next step of existence. But if we try to do it, John von Neumann would be among the top five in the list of scientific GOATs. Probably the best of all of his contributions is in the history of computer science - along with Arthur Burks and Herman Goldstine, he published a paper* in 1946 that practically described the architecture of a modern computers as we are familiar with today.


However, what he will be most remembered for is not a machine in existence today but one that is still just a theoretical and basically only an idea. Not yet anyways. In short, design of a von Neumann probe or a self-replicating spacecraft is not that far-fetched from all what we know today and if humanity sees its survival on Earth difficult in the future (to say the least) and tries to became interstellar or at least interplanetary species, von Neumann probe will indeed become the reality. If realized, that invention could, one day, be used to explore entire Milky Way galaxy in a relatively small amount of time.

The idea behind the probe is to use materials already available and accessible on rocky planets, moons and asteroids. The self-replicating spacecraft without all the limitations introduced by humans aboard (food, energy, small acceleration, sudden changes of direction, artificial gravity, health hazards, etc) would be able to travel from system to system, mine all the materials it needs to print even more spacecrafts and probes and move on. Ultimately, reaching the exponential curve of self-creation, the single craft would be able to build a vast number of copies of itself traveling in all directions.


By the worst estimate**, it would take up to 10 million years to dispatch millions of probes across the Milky Way (assuming the travel speed is about 1/10th of the speed of light). Of course, the first goal of exploring our galactical neighborhood, say within 100 light years in diameter, would be probably measured by centuries instead.

There are numerous challenges behind the machine exploration in such fashion and probably the main one would be to not have exponential self-creation be the goal itself and instead to send probes into real missions. For example, what come first to mind is to set the goal to explore nearby systems only for finding the nearest Earth-like planet and stop as soon as the mission is achieved. The replicated probes could be given new assignments after, i.e. to serve as ice haulers from outer system to inner planets if needed or to serve as a science probes from different regions of the planetary system they were last located.


I wanted this blog post to be both, short description of von Neumann's vision being one of Jules Verne's type of potential future and a small recommendation for one amazing novel series. In the science fiction, there are lots of 'von Neumann probe' plots in all media, especially acting as berserkers or villains in various novels and movies such as the Borg of Star Trek, a self-replicating bio-mechanical race or insect-like replicators from Stargate SG-1 TV show. 

Seeing me confused, Phil paused to give me more time to reflect. To be honest, I couldn't fathom how anybody would react to all this. Literally in just couple of minutes I have learned the origin of life and the entire structure of, well, everything. And yet, at that moment I felt like more is coming. Like the truth only started to unveil and I am about to understand the fate of what was undoubtedly beyond my comprehension.. The fate of the universe.. No less.

"Universe is collapsing." - Phil continued. "The very foundation of the casting sphere started to subside within itself and there is nothing I can do from my end."

"Do you refer to those white frames I saw five years ago?" - I recalled from the previous experience. "Those flashes of the world from normal texture to the frames from the lighthouse site where I was teleported?"

"No. Nothing like that. What I showed you before was just a dream I projected into your sentient driver. I wanted to introduce myself and show you a glimpse of the reality. To ease this conversation a bit. As a matter of fact, this evolutionary biological world is the real deal. The danger is physically real and unavoidable." - The words emphasized the last sentence. "Teleportation is real though. With help of these primordial orbs I can teleport any object anywhere in the universe, just by taking it out from its dimension and put it on the different sub-coordinates. Three-dimensional casting object would follow accordingly."

"Actually, that makes perfect sense.." - I pondered the dimensional logic. "Considering that you are from one dimension higher." After all, the higher dimension is just a set of infinite number of its subdimensions. The flashes from the physics class and equations of relations between 3d and 2d came to my mind. It could be the same with higher dimensions, only vastly complicated... But something else he said started to bother me as well.

After the longest minute of my life I finally regained my senses and rationality back and more importantly ability to speak. Well sort of. At the moment all I came up with was few incoherent words.

"I.. I'm.. Also glad..  To meet you. Phil?"

The initial fear and tremble started to fade out so I went to my desk and sit on the chair. The orb followed and kept the same distance.

"I am sure you have a lot of questions for me?"

"Well.. For starters you could tell me who you really are? And.. What is the meaning of all this? I mean, what happened five years ago.." - I was trying to remember all the questions I had after I woke up that morning and found the orb on the clock table next to my bad. But now all the new ones started to form in my mind and I was pretty confused. The orb definitely saw it on my face.

"It was five years for you but where I came from time is something entirely different. It was just a moment ago for me." - Phil gave me couple of seconds to sink in and then continued. "In my plain of existence, I am a student, just like you." - The orb made a slight position change and proceed. "But let's back to your conversation with your father couple of minutes ago, it would be best for you to understand if we start from there."

"Yes.. You said he was right. You mean two dimensional bubble around the universe is real. We are made of holographic particles reflected by our true selves from the balloon surface?

"Yes and no." - Phil continued to flicker in all colors while speaking. "The bubble exists all right, but it is created in four dimensional reality. The only thing is that dimensions are not all proportional. One of them is larger than the others and one is really tiny, speaking in physics terms. They are designed in that way in order to cast three dimensional objects inside the bubble. Everything here in this universe is actually a three dimensional shadow from the bubble surrounding it. Or to be precise, every four dimensional object in the bubble is actively casting it's own representation inhere."

"But how this casting really work...." - There was so many information for a high school student in just couple of sentences and only now I realized I missed the premise. "Wait. You said designed? Created? By whom?"

"By me, of course."

At this point it occurred to me two more explanations of all this. It's either I finally went 100% crazy and this was my first hallucination or somebody is pranking me with some cool magic trick. I was about to announce to my new friend here that first option is more likely but he promptly continued.

"I am not God or anything like it, if you are thinking about it right now. Look at it this way, you here developed complex computers with ability to render equally complex simulation. This is very similar. Where I came from, we use, sort of analogue computational devices capable to create sub-dimensional environments. We utilized those machines for education. This is one of them and there are many more. Just like I hinted five years ago, this is similar to those zero-player games you are probably familiar with. I created only initial states of the three-dimensional universe and the rest came out from it by evolutionary steps. The best about it is that I can monitor what happens in snapshots. The time in the bubble is set to be very fast comparing to my end."

The voice sounded excited while explaining. I took it as a sign of his character as a student who is still learning exciting things. I know I was no different either.

"But to answer your second question, casting is possible because the energy needed to cast objects from four-dimensional bubble into three-dimensional interior is coming from.."

"Fifth dimension!" - I interrupted way more enthusiastically then him before. "The origin must be one dimension higher! You are fifth dimensional being!"

"Exactly right. Two of two."

"Amazing! I saw once Carl Sagan's interpolation of the tesseract from 4D into its shadow in 3D. This is just like it, except we are talking now about a live universe who gave birth to life!"

"Not exactly."

"What do you mean?"

"It's not live. Actually, not a single universe in any simulations I've heard about ever succeeded with emerging life by their own."

"But.. All the life here on Earth.. How?"

"I created the model to assign sentient driver to every object who's born naturally or artificially within the system."

"Sentient driver?"

"Something similar to the artificial intelligence from your world. Much complicated though."

"So, my conscience as everybody's in the universe is just a software part of your bubble computer.. What about free will?"

"There is no such thing. Biologically or otherwise. Free will is just an illusion coming from vast number of variables. But don't take it inferiorly. In my world, sentient drivers are equal in complexity to the real life, if real life is what I am supposed to be.. Actually nobody believes that even we could not be sentient drivers either. We could also be shadows of upper-dimensions as well. Life as it seems is as much as mystery as it is here."

I found my way back to the chair. I certainly didn't expect anything like it. This really is the game, only we are all non-player characters in Phil's zero-player game that even he cannot deviate from the course of artificial evolution. Or can he? After all he is talking with me from fifth dimension in real time. The orb must be anomaly of some kind. A back door to his own simulation.

"I know what are you thinking right now. And you can relax. I cannot read sentient minds, you are on your own. That's for sure. While I can project objects like this orb inside the simulation I cannot affect evolutionary steps or to interfere with driver's actions. Not that it's forbidden or anything. It's just impossible by it's nature. I can project a dream or two here and there but this is not influencing the system with much significance. If at all..." - Phil made a significant pause here. I could tell by the light and the glowing vanished for a long second. I couldn't describe exactly how but when it came back the feeling it radiated changed. "The thing is that this is my first educational project and I shouldn't interfere in any ways. But overtime I grown attached to this entire space it was created. It is really beautiful in more ways than you can imagine..."

"Why then? Why are you do it? Why talking to me?" - The only question left at that point remained floating in the air and I was little afraid to raise it.

"Why me?"

Phil rotated and the glow transformed into recognizable patterns. Images started to form on the orb's surface and change from one to another in a fast snapshot fashion. Some I recognized from the history lessons, others were unfamiliar and futuristic. Some looked alien but beautiful nevertheless. Then it returned to the regular form.

"Because..."

The orb floated a foot closer.

"...I need your help."

I guess my sentient mind wasn't programmed to reply to this in any ways so I just cluelessly stared at Phil and his three blue shivering nodes and his smooth surface glowing in all colors I was familiar with and some I imagined to see for the first time.

"I want you to help me to save the universe." 

Sometimes after lunch my father and I enjoyed talking about different things and on many occasions we exchanged opinions about science fiction, movies and mysteries of the universe. That warm October day was no different.

"You gotta be kidding!" - I was inspecting my father's face in search for any hint of a concealed smile that would explain a joke he was telling me. "There is a two dimensional balloon surrounding our universe where real life is located and the 3D cosmos inside a balloon is just a holographic illusion? You are saying that you and me are flat as two pieces of paper, actually living at the end of the universe and all these here are just holograms?" - For some reason I was unusually irritated by the silly physics. Although, on the other hand, if cosmology was not that strange to begin with, we wouldn't have that many great sci-fi shows and movies... "So, we are made of... What exactly.. Light? Energy?"

He smiled. "Holographic particles. It's not a joke. Real science. A valid theory at least. Take black holes for instance, they are still a big mystery.. If Hawking was right, any black hole no matter how massive would evaporate over time. When that happens all the information swallowed inside would be lost. The problem is that quantum dynamics is clear about it - nothing, especially information, can ever be lost.. They say that information could be located somewhere else." - He paused to allow the words to sink in.

I don't know how to explain... 

I mean people have vivid dreams for sure. My best friend told me about his dream just the other day and boy... It was real horror story and it had everything, amazing heroes, real twisted villain and so much details with action to the level that even Stephen King would not be ashamed of.

But me.. I don't know. It's so strange... 

My dreams have left me. Five years ago I had my last dream. Ever since then it's blank. The nights are just restful and uneventful. There's no remembering in the morning. And I am not sure that last dream was even a dream. Hell.. I know it was not a dream. I know because it is still here. In my room. 

The orb.

The strangest thing is that it's still glowing. But even more peculiar about it is that I am the only one who sees it. The glowing I mean. The orb is not noticeable otherwise by anybody who visited my room. Except for my father, I saw him once taking it in his hands and inspecting it like it had some special meaning to him. Maybe because he was in my dream too. After all, he was the one who told me in the dream that life is just a game of some sort. He was the one who gave me the orb.

"Where did you get this orb from? It looks little familiar.. Old too." - He asked me while rotating it and examining its perfect grey curve but seemingly not noticing the glaringness from one of the blue bulges carved on top of it.

"Ahem.. You don't you see it?"

"See what?"

"The blue node.. Do you.. Do you find anything unusual about it?"

He turned the orb and had a closer look to all three nodes but I could tell he's not seeing anything unusual and extraordinary.

"The curvature is perfect and it does look too heavy." - He put it back on the small dresser next to the clock where it was. "What is it anyway?"

"Just a decoration.. Somebody gave it to me for my birthday on Sunday." - I answered and turned in hope he didn't see my disappointed expression. I never told him about the dream and the glowing orb. I never told anybody about it. I was afraid back then.

After five years the fear was different. Instead I was afraid for my sanity. After all the dreamless years I was starting to believe I was going crazy. But from the bottom of my soul.. I don't know. All my rationality was telling me that there was more to the story. It's just a feeling telling me to wait. Telling me that the fear is irrational. Telling me that a new dream is coming.

I couldn't be more wrong...

Continues in Revelation of Life - Phil

Since time immemorial, scientific thought did not flow in a straight line. It was full of retrograde motion and ups and downs and many theories were debunked along the way. Take for instant Einstein’s static universe or theory about existence of small planet in the orbit between Mercury and the Sun. On the other hand, illusions originated in our brains were not uncommon either. For the biggest example, we are all aware that weirdly huge Moon right next to the horizon is coming strait from the trickery of our mind. But what about time? It is definitely something we are taking for granted for a vary long time. Could it be both, construct of our own brain and yet based on something more fundamental and still waiting for better understanding?


The time from our daily experience, feels very much real. We are living in it's present state and it flows inevitably forward to the uncertain future and thanks to our memories and factual evidence all around us it came from the certain past. If we bring the physics to the help, the future state of the universe is as it seems and thanks to current understanding fully dependent of the previous state, energy, speed and direction of its every component down to the smallest particle or energy unit or whatever is the most fundamental object of the universe. The current mainstream science agrees with Einstein who presented time as a mere fourth coordinate of the three dimensional space we are living in.

However and by all we know today, we could imagine an incredibly powered computer capable of predicting any future state of the universe just by knowing current state of all fundamentals within. In simple words if we know that two particles are going to collide our futuristic computer could accurately predict what happens after the collision based on direction, energy, speed and all the properties of the two particles. Or energy waves. Or strings. Or whatever. Now, if that same engine is the one governing the entire universe, it could easily render the next state of existence and pretty much everything what will happen in the future. And not only that it could render all the states of the universe in the future - it could store them all in so called block universe that contains everything that has ever happened and will happen at any time and at any place. In such solution, the time would only be changing states of the block universe from one render to another.


In this kind of philosophy of time, all states of predefined or pre-calculated universe we could call present. There is no past or the future. Instead, the present state simply constantly changes. Or simply the past, present and future all exist - and are equally real. To paraphrase physicist Max Tegmark from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the analogy could be the disc with a two hours long movie. If we are watching the movie we would need that two hours to pass and yet the entire movie is stored at that one disc. Every single scene of it is there at once and we could go forward or rewind to each scene and the moment of perceiving them would always be the present.

Now, if the block universe is what we are living in, could we go fast forward to the future render or rewind back to some point in history snapshot? In this alternative of what we recognize as time travel, could we make changes and would it force the universe to recalculate and re-render everything that this particular changes affect from that point forward? It's easy to imagine that even the small information leaked from one present frame to another could cause the ripple and the need for new rendering of countable percentage of the block universe depending to the degree of the change.


How we, conscious minds living within the block universe, experience time would be just an illusion. What we know as yesterday, today or tomorrow would all be the same, encoded snapshots of one universe govern by the fundamentals on the microscopic level we are all made of. It's sure hard to accept this possibility as the one of the feasible solutions to the grand understanding of everything considering the fact that everything is already determined and that the free will is only apparent due to enormous number of variables. On the other hand we are already living in the weird world according to all we know today that we are taking for granted. For instance, consider the time needed the light to come from your loved ones standing just next to you and the time needed the brain to process the image captured in your eyes into neural network of your brain - what you are actually seeing is already in the past. Few fraction of nanoseconds but the past it is. What we think of the present, it could be something else entirely.

At the very end, and to jump from scientific philosophy to science fiction, exploring the idea of living in the block universe with possibility to travel back to earlier memory and keep original timeline memory stream intact would be extraordinary to say the least. Yesterday I finished reading 'Recursion', a novel by Blake Crouch that is centered to this very idea. Without spoiling anything further I'd just say that my entire review to the Amazon's page was: "Where's the sixth star?" 

Image refs:
https://plus.maths.org/content/why-not-block-time
https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/.../blake-crouch-on-his-wild-new-thriller
https://www.healththoroughfare.com/science/.../first-time-machine/

Science refs:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04558-7