Regular events don’t provide us with any information, of course. They can’t do that because nothing new is happening – only unique events represent information. It’s only information if it’s never happened before. We could therefore say that the very first time something happens then this represents information, but when that unique, unprecedented event is repeated (i.e., when it becomes ‘a rule’) then there’s no information in it.

 

 

This way of expressing things gives us a very clear (if distinctly uncomfortable) perspective on what is happening (or not happening) in our everyday lives – everything is fresh and vivid and quintessentially unprecedented when we start off in life (if the societal / familial pressures that are acting on us aren’t too great) from but as time goes on everything we do or think becomes an echo of something we have done or thought before. What’s more, anything that is foreign to our established way of looking at the world becomes something to be regarded with great mistrust and suspicion. We have imperceptibly slipped into ‘conservative mode’ (which is where anything new is an enemy) – despite it being the case that without ‘the challenge of the new’ life slowly but surely degrades into a mere parody of itself.

 

 

This isn’t just unfortunate (or regrettable), it’s an outright catastrophe, therefore. It’s the worst disaster that could ever befall us and yet – because this process is so universal, because it’s happening to everyone else at the same time as it happens to us – we never think anything of it. We don’t think about it because we don’t notice it – this profoundly process malign is perfectly invisible to us. And not only do we not see it, we see it invertedly (which is to say, we see it as a good thing, we see it as a positive progression). We think we’re on the road to somewhere great, somewhere significant, somewhere meaningful; but we’re seeing everything completely backwards. In effect, we’re claiming that the disaster is a complete success (or at the very least that it has the potential for being turned into a success if we stick at it).

 

 

Once we start talking about things in this way then it becomes clear that we can’t actually define information; defining stuff means that we’re seeing it in terms of some kind of an a priori framework, within the terms of some system (or way of organising things) that has already been established. Essentially – therefore – there’s a precedence for what we’re doing, it has been ‘authorized by the fact of its own previous existence’. If the act of defining something requires us to see what we’re defining in the light of what has gone before which is – needless to say, what the word ‘precedence’ means – then this shows that our definitions don’t themselves contain any information. To define something is to denude it of any information content that it might previously have had. When we try to define the term ‘information’ this involves us in a loop of self-contradiction, which is showing us that our so-called ‘definitions’ are essentially empty. To talk about defining what is meant by the term ‘information’ is therefore quite meaningless.

 

 

We can nevertheless define information in a negative way by saying very clearly what it ‘isn’t’. Information – we may say – has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what we might previously have assumed to be true. This negative definition of information is something of an ‘eye opener’, therefore – it’s an ‘eye opener’ because it challenges our entire way of seeing things. It takes away any notion of a solid basis (or ‘foundation’) that we might have been relying on. When we talk about being interested in ‘gaining knowledge’ (or ‘extending our horizons’, or however else we might want to put it) this always means building upon whatever basis it is that we are assuming. What it absolutely doesn’t mean is ‘learning that our solid basis is not so solid after all’ (but merely’ something that we’re lazily taking for granted but which isn’t actually true). We’re not interested in genuine information, in other words, we’re only interested in finding out stuff that backs up what we fondly imagine we already know. We’re only interested in discovering the sort of ‘truths’ that support our foundation for understanding the world. We seek confirmation in all things…

 

 

In terms of the Von Weiszacker Model of Pragmatic Information, we can say that we live – to all practical purposes – in a universe that is composed entirely of ‘confirmation’, a universe which reflects our expectations back at us pretty much perfectly. The Universe of Confirmation is thus a closed universe, which is another way of saying that it is frozen (and what this means is quite simply that what we’re blithely calling ‘the universe’ is actually no more than a simulation). It’s not possible to freeze reality without turning it into a simulation; the real (or ‘flowing’) world ‘splits off’ a simulation just as soon as it becomes closed off to novelty (which is ‘information that doesn’t agree with our expectations’). Having said this, however, we ought to put out that the universe never does become ‘closed’ in any real sense; what becomes closed to new information is us, of course. We create our own versions of the universe based on whatever impressions we happened to start off with (as Robert Anton Wilson says). It’s as if we take a photo of the world and then proceed to ‘live in the image we took’ as if this static image were the actual real thing.

 

 

We can look at this the other way around too – instead of saying that ‘the universe gets turned into a simulation the moment we shut our minds’ we could say that ‘we get transformed into a simulation the moment we shut our minds’ (and that the simulation we get turned into is the everyday ego or Extrinsic Self). The mind-created version of the universe is a ‘frozen picture’, and so too is the mind-created version of us. This isn’t the way we tend to look at it, of course – it comes easier to us to entertain the idea of the universe being the simulation, and ourselves as simply being ‘ourselves’ (whilst at the same time ‘living in that simulation’). My body might (arguably) be part of this simulation, but even so I still feel ‘who I understand myself to be’ to be real and authentic, and not a mere ‘conditioned phenomenon’. The vantage point from which we view the conditioned world is the very same thing as that conditioned world, however; it isn’t anything separate, anything authentic. Our ‘sense of who we are’ is provided for us by the conditioning factor just as everything else is; or – as we could also say – the world we see around us is a projection of the ego or extrinsic self and so too is the ego a ‘back-projection (or ‘reflection’) of the concrete world that we perceive and believe in. Each ‘projects’ the other, so to speak – I project the world, and then that world projects me in reciprocation. Nothing here is ‘real’, therefore. It’s all just ‘an empty loop of spurious logic’.

 

 

The so-called ‘simulation’ is nothing more than a projection of the extrinsic self and so the universe we live in is itself that ‘extrinsic self’. We’re not ‘trapped in this simulation’ therefore, but rather ‘the simulation of who we are’ is trapped (so to speak) in ‘the simulation of the world’. Only the ES isn’t really trapped in the simulation because it itself is the simulation. It will do us no good at all to try to ‘escape’ because there’s nowhere else for us to exist! There’s nowhere for us to escape to. All the ego’s dreams of ‘improving itself’ (of somehow ‘elevating itself to some higher station in life’) are never going to be any more than just this therefore – dreams. To add to the irony, the ego (or ES) cannot survive as a viable proposition (as an ‘ongoing concern’) unless it can believe that there is a valid possibility of it ‘bettering itself’, that there is a chance of it ‘improving its situation’ and ‘attaining thereby to some higher plane of existence’ (however we might like to express this). The extrinsic self really does live in its dreams or fantasies, therefore. It has to live there because there’s nowhere else for it to live. The extrinsic self is the one thing that can never be fixed (as unsatisfactory as it might be). ‘Self-improvement’ is perfectly useless preoccupation, therefore.

 

 

This explains why there is always this fervour of ‘goal-making’ and the unhealthy excitement that goes with it; of course we’re ‘big into our goals’ – without them we wouldn’t find the motivation to carry on existing. Without them we wouldn’t be able to carry on deceiving ourselves that we can improve our situation. It doesn’t matter what our goals are either, of course; what’s important isn’t the nature of the goal itself but what attaining it secretly means to us. On ‘an unconscious symbolic level’ the attaining of goals means that we are elevating our station in life so that we can become ‘more than we were’, or ‘more than anyone else is’. Ultimately, it means that we believe we can – if we ‘do the right stuff’ (or, if we ‘move in the right circles’) – become real…

 

 

Psychotherapist Gregory Tucker expresses this by saying something to the effect that ‘the dreamer which mind dreams’ is motivated in all things to prove (both to itself and others) that what isn’t true actually is. This is ‘the Master Lie’ –

The dream features the dreamers using their rendition of “The Personhood Package” in the dream to defending “The Master Lie”, or what it takes in this dream to defend the fiction right now is real, and not a mind generated dream. If right now can only be a Mind generated dream (MGD), then trying to prove truth is false can only be a mind generated charade, featuring the dreamers in ‘reality’ defending the lie it’s possible to prove truth is false with their rendition of “The Personhood Package,” which always includes story, or the conclusions the dreamer assembles to defend the fiction right now is real, the self, which is becomes the hero in the dreamer’s story, and the skit, or how the dreamer engaged in “The Endless re-run of its story,’ for a lifetime, or until the dreamer wakes up.

 

 

The simulation of us is motivated by the belief that it can prove that it has (or can have) a bona fide existence outside of the simulation. Richard Burton says, ‘The lower self is imagination. The Higher Self is consciousness.’ Greg Tucker talks about ‘the dream that mind dreams’, which is ‘a dream without an outside’. The dreamer can’t ever leave the dream since it itself is part of that dream. Philip K Dick – in a similar vein – talks in terms of there being ‘two realms’ –

 

Two realms there are, upper and lower. The upper, derived from hyperuniverse I or Yang, Form I of Parmenides, is sentient and volitional. The lower realm, or Yin, Form II of Parmenides, is mechanical, driven by blind, efficient cause, deterministic and without intelligence, since it emanates from a dead source. In ancient times it was termed “astral determinism.”

 

 

In terms of information, we can say that there are only two things – genuine information (which equals ‘novelty’) and false (or ‘fake’) information (which is information that agrees with our expectations, information that agrees with the assumptions that we have made without knowing that we have). We can also say that we can only continue to exist – in the strictly provisional way that we do exist – by not questioning. We don’t question the assumptions that we’ve made without knowing that we’ve made them. Naturally we don’t question them – if we don’t know that we’ve made them then how can we question them? Instead of talking about ‘questioning’ therefore, we could simply speak in terms of awareness – if we are to ‘make a go of it’ (as the extrinsic self, as the ego) then naturally actual ‘awareness’ can’t come into it. Actual awareness can’t be allowed to intrude upon the scene. That would be the very last thing we want! What we have instead are rules and rules are what the simulation is made of, after all. The simulation is composed of nothing else but rules…

 

 

Instead of being ‘aware of what’s there’ we do something else – we ‘accept what is given to us’, which is of course a very different kind of thing. ‘Accepting what we have been given’ is a purely passive kind of a thing; obeying rules is of course always going to be a passive business – it is in fact the perfect antithesis of awareness. Continuing with this way of looking at it, we can say that transitioning from the unconscious mode of existence where we are asleep and dreaming to actual consciousness involves a form of radical disobedience (or rebellion). This doesn’t mean ‘fighting against the rules’ (because if we do that then the rules will define us just as much as if we were ‘passively obeying them’). ‘To fight against the empire is to be infected by its derangement’, says PKD. We don’t ‘decide not to obey the rules of the simulation’ (which would be ‘resisting the rules’) – we just ‘see the rules for what they are’, which is the ultimate form of ‘disobedience’. How dare we! Our disobedience will spoil everything… Furthermore, we see the rules for what they are in an ‘unexcited’ sort of way. To quote James Carse, we see that ‘There is no rule saying that there has to be a rule’. ‘Excitement’ – which is to say, <attraction versus aversion> – inevitably means that we can’t see anything; ‘…a man who struggles cannot understand’, says Krishnamurti.

 

 

There’s no shortcut to ‘not being excited by projected outcomes’, however (there is no convenient hack for ‘not being excited by whatever thoughts come our way’) – this is not a state of being that we can bring about ‘to order’, as it were. In one way, we could say that this is useless knowledge; knowing that ‘being excited’ distorts our view of reality constitutes useless knowledge since there’s no way that we can become ‘non-excited’ on purpose (which is to say, there’s no way in which we can ‘gain equanimity’ on purpose). Knowing that we can only see into reality when it doesn’t matter to us in the least what that reality turns out to be (i.e., when we don’t have any underlying agenda) doesn’t help us any since we can’t very well have ‘an agenda to have no agenda’.

 

 

Thought is always biased, whilst consciousness is quintessentially unbiased, and what this means is that thought ‘creates its own reality’ – it creates a reality that exactly reflects its own unacknowledged agenda or basis. They could therefore say that thought gives rise to null worlds – worlds that seem to be real but which aren’t. Null worlds are ‘worlds that have no information in them’, they are ‘worlds that we can be subsumed within forever, and yet never actually do anything in, or be anything in’. We can feel that we are doing something, or feel that we are being something, but there’s no substance to this – there is no substance to the dreams we dream. We know this because there is always an edge to us, an ‘edge of desperation’ – something very humourless. This desperation (this humourlessness) shows itself in our ambition, in our need to succeed, in our violence and aggression. And yet the more aggressive and competitive we are (which is to say, the more we act out our biases) the more hopelessly trapped in the illusion we become.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image credit – ‘The Curator’ AI Artwork, Dead End Gallery, on tomorrowsworldtoday.com