How the Peer-to-Peer Simulation Hypothesis Explains Just About Everything

None of this fits the mindset of the P2P. The P2P Simulation Hypothesis is entirely an intellectual/scientific concept, divorced from spiritual belief systems. The two occupy entirely different classes of world views, and it seems that the P2P system probably requires the entire field of the paranormal evidence to either be dismissed, or accepted but only as a simulation of a higher reality that is really just another simulation level. 

I like the P2P model of how living things communicate, with each other's minds and more importantly with their environments.

The simulation belief is not credible for me.  However, Arvan's exploration of it is well done and profitable for all struggling with "how mind works".

I agree that P2P doesn't fit the semi-empirical accounts of anomalous events that have been observed through all history.  But parsing that evidence is not well organized.  Myself, I don't believe in reincarnation and see a more obvious explanation for the evidence.   Experiencing someone else's life experience does not have to mean - you were them.  It ignores less extreme events of telepathy.

Myself, I don't believe in reincarnation and see a more obvious explanation for the evidence.   Experiencing someone else's life experience does not have to mean - you were them.  It ignores less extreme events of telepathy.

Perhaps you are offering a solution to the wrong problem. That is to say, perhaps your description of reincarnation is incomplete.

The real issue to be explained is trauma and PTSD, where there is no event in the current life corresponding to real distress and pain which exists. This needs to be explained regardless of presence or absence of past-life recall. I'm not aware of any explanation which even begins to be adequate if reincarnation is dismissed.

Perhaps you are offering a solution to the wrong problem. That is to say, perhaps your description of reincarnation is incomplete.

The real issue to be explained is trauma and PTSD, where there is no event in the current life corresponding to real distress and pain which exists. This needs to be explained regardless of presence or absence of past-life recall. I'm not aware of any explanation which even begins to be adequate if reincarnation is dismissed.

"Many Lives, Many Masters" by Dr. Brian Weiss, comes to mind. The woman he was treating was only healed through reliving past-life memories, traumas, which were carried over many lifetimes.

I forget if this book has ever been mentioned on the forum, so I'll post this here anyways:

https://www.thoughtco.com/many-lives-man...rs-1770561

What do you think happens when a person physically dies? Paranormal evidence indicates survival of a sort of the human personality, and a continuation in some sort of higher spiritual realm (probably made up of many different separate levels of spiritual advancement), in a cycle involving repeated incarnations. Glimpses of this have been furnished from NDE accounts.

I'm planning a trip to Lilydale this Spring or Summer, and I'll let you know.

For now I lean strongly in the post-mortem survival camp.

This tentative blurry picture of the real nature of consciousness (nonlocal and nonmaterial), and an afterlife and its conditions all derived from empirical evidence, seems rather not congruent with the P2P Simulation Hypothesis. In deep NDEs and other transcendental experiences the other realm is more real, and consciousness is much clearer than in physical life and more in contact with the Infinite. The implication of P2P is that the afterlife glimpsed in NDEs is just another aspect of the simulation, so then we have to try to imagine why the User would want to delude himself by multiple levels of simulated reality, and multiple levels of higher consciousness in these simulated realities including perception of a Deity.  

Why does whatever is on the other side of the NDE want to enter into this world? It seems to me the questions we can ask of the P2P Sim Hypothesis is echoed in wondering why God stuck us in this reality?

None of this fits the mindset of the P2P. The P2P Simulation Hypothesis is entirely an intellectual/scientific concept, divorced from spiritual belief systems. The two occupy entirely different classes of world views, and it seems that the P2P system probably requires the entire field of the paranormal evidence to either be dismissed, or accepted but only as a simulation of a higher reality that is really just another simulation level.

Well this would very much depend on the nature of the higher frame, which may not be akin to our reality. In fact, if there is a sense in which mental causation is patently obvious in the higher frame (perhaps because Mind controls Time/Space/Causality with ease) it can't be.

In P2P the human person is apparently the temporarily deluded persona of one of the Users in the higher frame. If the higher Self of the human person is the User, then on physical death it (presumably the Soul) would immediately "wake up" in its higher home reality and assume its normal non-spiritual activities, not persist in another simulated but higher spiritual realm for a time followed by simulated reincarnation in a long process of self-perfection. 

In the picture presented by parapsychology what is a person in this life but a temporarily deluded persona separated from the actual state of things in the higher frame?

Could you explain a few of the ways science could falsify the P2P Simulation Hypothesis, when absolutely all of the experimental results they are getting, and especially all of their perceptions of them, are produced by the simulation?

You need a Multiverse Hypothesis, a 3-D world as 2-d information plane, and a variance in quantum mechanics solely within the brains of conscious agents.
That's a pretty tall order IMO.

Could you explain a few of the ways science could falsify the P2P Simulation Hypothesis, when absolutely all of the experimental results they are getting, and especially all of their perceptions of them, are produced by the simulation?

It's a good point, but any "model of reality" has this problem as far as I can see. That is why I try and remember that nobody else's preferred model is any dumber than my own.

In the picture presented by parapsychology what is a person in this life but a temporarily deluded persona separated from the actual state of things in the higher frame?

Good point. But then why would the User not send intimations of his true nature and the nature of the P2P Simulation higher reality frame back with returning NDEers, for instance? Instead we get accounts more reflecting traditional spirituality.

But then, it occurs to me that the P2P Simulation virtual reality system might just be the instrumentality or mechanism through which very high level spiritual beings chose to implement their spiritual system. Then presumably NDEers would just not have the "need to know" as far as concerns the ultimate nature of the multi-level reality they inhabit. 

You need a Multiverse Hypothesis, a 3-D world as 2-d information plane, and a variance in quantum mechanics solely within the brains of conscious agents.
That's a pretty tall order IMO.

Could you explicate this a little more ?

Wrong thread...

Not that wrong I should think, but maybe I'm wrong about that.  

Good point. But then why would the User not send intimations of his true nature and the nature of the P2P Simulation higher reality frame back with returning NDEers, for instance? Instead we get accounts more reflecting traditional spirituality.

But then, it occurs to me that the P2P Simulation virtual reality system might just be the instrumentality or mechanism through which very high spiritual beings chose to implement their spiritual system. Then presumably NDEers would just not have the "need to know" as far as concerns the ultimate nature of the multi-level reality they inhabit.

Well the P2P Hype is foremost a functional account, by which I mean a good way of describing our situation which is very much Gnostic if proponents are correct about the dualism of reality levels - I think it gets a bit tricky because you can, and Arvan does, layer in more suggestions in subsequent papers...one of which suggesting even today's video game entities may feel pain...I think part of our disagreement is I started with New Theory of Free Will and followed him chronologically, you read his last paper re: The Meta Problem where he more strongly suggests informational structures could in fact feel things even without a user "plugged into the Matrix".

For our purposes, another way of describing a similar situation to the one Arvan describes is Bernardo's account for Idealism as a means of connecting the disparate realities suggested by the Relational Interpretation of QM:

According to RQM, there are no absolute—that is, observer-independent—physical quantities. Instead, all physical quantities—the entire physical world—are relative to the observer, in a way analogous to motion. This is motivated by the fact that, according to quantum theory, different observers can account differently for the same sequence of events. Consequently, each observer is inferred to “inhabit” its own physical world, as defined by the context of its own observations.

The price of this uncompromising honesty in acknowledging the implications of quantum mechanics is a number of philosophical qualms. First, the idea that the physical world one inhabits is a product of one’s private observations seems to imply solipsism, an anathema in philosophy. Second, RQM entails that “a complete description of the world is exhausted by the relevant [Shannon] information that systems have about each other.” However, according to Shannon, information isn’t a thing unto itself. Instead, it is constituted by the discernible configurations of a substrate.

Yet, if there is no absolute physical substrate, what then constitutes information? Third—and perhaps most problematic of all—the RQM tenet that all physical quantities are relative raises an obvious question: relative to what? We only see meaning in a relative quantity such as motion because we assume there to be absolute physical bodies that move with respect to one another. But RQM denies all physical absolutes that could ground the meaning of relative quantities.

Notice that the root of all these philosophical qualms is the assumption that only physical quantities exist.

Nothing in P2P Hype necessitates we have to have actual processors in the higher frame, rather this higher frame can look very much like Kastrup's Mind@Large. Bernard Heischel has also proposed the world as Idealist VR Simulation, to see something that might be a middle ground between P2P Hype and Kastrup's Idealism.

Falsification - could the Peer-to-Peer Simulation Hypothesis be considered "scientific", or is it perhaps just sophisticated not-so-idle speculation? For a scientific theory to be considered valid, scientists usually require "testability" - that there be an experiment that could, in principle, rule the theory out — or ‘falsify’ it, as the philosopher of science Karl Popper put it in the 1930s. 

An interesting brief article on falsification and theory, scientific or not, in particular, string theory and the multiverse is at https://www.nature.com/news/feuding-phys...lp-1.19076 . 

The situation is that the only overarching theories available able to incorporate quantum mechanics and gravity  and relativity are things like string theory, for which there is no experimental or observational evidence, even though theoretically such might barely be possible at some indefininably high and unattainable energies. 

"(The investigators) cited string theory as the principal example. The theory replaces elementary particles with infinitesimally thin strings to reconcile the apparently incompatible theories that describe gravity and the quantum world. The strings are too tiny to detect using today’s technology — but some argue that string theory is worth pursuing whether or not experiments will ever be able to measure its effects, simply because it seems to be the ‘right’ solution to many quandaries."

Another case of an intractable scientific problem is "fine tuning", for which the only theoretical non-teleological "scientific" explanation is the multiverse. Also in this case, there is no and probably never will be any experimental or observational evidence. 

But a lot is at stake, especially with fine tuning, where the viability of reductive materialist naturalism is on the line. Accordingly, the temptation seems to be overwhelming. Some scientists want to ditch Popper's falsification criterion and embrace such theories entirely because they explain a lot, elegantly or not, and they want them to be true. I think this is a sad turn for science as the premier endeavor of our civilization.

It seems to me that the P2P Simulation Hypothesis is in the same category, though much less thoroughly and mathematically worked out. P2P is attractive because it seems to be an elegant way of explaining a lot of otherwise mysterious properties of our reality. But since in the hypothesis absolutely everything observable is an artifact of the simulation it seems impossible for there to be an experiment that could rule it out. Is it "scientific"? Probably not.