This is a painting by a Belgian artist René Magritte intitled The Treason of Images. I first saw this in high school, a copy hanging off the wall in our philosophy class. I thought it was nicely painted but had no idea what it said underneath. So I asked a girl in my class who spoke French to translate it for me and she said it read: This is not a pipe.
My first reaction to this at 15 was quite teenager-ish, I thought it was pure nonsense. I saw it as something irrelevant, shallow and pointless. Today when I see 14 and 15 year old teenagers react the same way, at first I feel like "How can they not see it?!" but then I remember back to my first reaction and understand...some things you just can't grasp that early on.
I was very into video games a few years back, especially into the GTA series. Not really because of the violence, I wasn't particularly into that, I was the one driving around as carefully as possible, what interested me was the story line, which, despite the abundance of violence, blood and killings, was there and was interesting. Nothing in it happened without a reason.
I was playing it and the idea slowly seeped inside of me. In the game everything is set up for you, the individual, the player to explore. Everything is a projection, from the oceans, cities and buildings, down to every "person" in the video game which is supposed to give the impression of a busy city and everyday people. It's all a projection, all a calculated program to push you through its story line which you have to finish. It works like that in every video game, also in almost all of the books.
And this was food for thought. What if this translates into our every day reality, what if we are inside some sort of a program, a projection of things to influence us into a certain direction. The question immediately posses, who is the programmer? Is there something which directs us? Or is it a sort of free simulation, a one in which we all decide our future outcome...
At first this lead me into a much more extreme direction. I first started contemplating that, maybe only I am real and everyone and everything else is this projection, like the video game. So this would mean, from my point of view, that I am posting a blog for the projections to read it, but from your point of view it would mean that a projection from your own "simulated" world is writing about being a projection for you to realize that you're the only one who is real.
I explored that idea for a while, in a sense still do, but it has changed since then a bit. I don't view myself as the only real thing in the universe anymore (which was an extremely selfish view, looking back at it), but I see everyone as real, the only difference is that we are both...for ourselves we are real, for everyone else we are projections.
In my head it works sort of like this. When you meet someone, you meet this projection and the same thing is happening vice versa. Real person meeting someone who is also real, but they both see each other as projections. You enter a world of someone else, you can look inside it, you can see it, hear it, smell it and feel it, but you will never fully understand it. Like a glitch in the program, it will never allow you to fully comprehend someone elses reality because it could distort or even shut down your own. Just imagine what could happen if we could completely and fully fall inside someones world, not only view it and observe it, but completely correlate to it...wouldn't our own reality disappear?
Here steps in Magritte's painting back in new light. So the pipe really isn't a pipe. It looks like it, but it's only a 2D projections of the element manufactured in our world. The picture we see might look real, but it isn't. And here comes a dark twist to the whole simulation.
If it truly is that, only a simulation, then there is nothing wrong for you to kill a certain projection. You won't feel the pain of the fatal wound, and you can assume from this theory that the projection won't feel it either (just like in the video game). But our own program decided to ensure this wouldn't happen (as often), so it fitted us with a command inside (most) of us that we call empathy. The ability to relate to other "projections" and what they might be feeling, although we can never truly know what that may be or even if they are feeling anything at all!
We trust our own experiences and we assume what someone else might be feeling in a certain situation. So that keeps us from killing everyone we dislike and prevents us, as a species, to evaporate. Again, imagine the world or our society in which there is no empathy...would we even be here right now? We would probably kill ourselves somewhere early on in our evolution...probably.
In this theory something else intrigued me quite a bit...everyone's experienced coincidences which are hard to dismiss as mere happenstance, which our logical minds find difficult to explain, and we all search from where these coincidences came...some find it in religion, others find magical energies floating in the universe and some say it's as simple as a coincidence, nothing more than that.
My head was fucked a few times by these strange occurrences and I've always left them as just simple coincidence, I tried rationalizing them but I never managed to write them off. I left them in my sub conscious to float until something reasonable comes along and explains them away. But I also started imagining,...if this world is just a simulation for each individual, how do coincidences fit in?
Like a story-line which you are following, it pushes you back or forward into a certain direction you may or may not like. That brought a question...so, there are stories we follow? We don't have free will? The "program" decided this was our tale and we must walk on its path no matter what?
I explain it by the power of our sub conscious brains. We constantly give ourselves goals to achieve, sometimes without us knowing. The sub conscious observes and absorbs everything around us, all the projections... the ones it likes, it puts as a standard for us. So we constantly feel our own reality could be improved and should be, because of what we see around us. We try relating to the projection, to feel more a part of it, to look like another projection, be noninvasive, regular.
Sometimes the goals are more noble, trying to be a better person, being more giving, but it's never altruistic, it's never really to help other people, other "projections", it's also selfish, also egoistic, because we all know the feeling of giving, helping, it feels great. So it's again by our own reality that we are govern to be good or bad to the simulation around us.
But, of course, none of our goals or wishes prepare us for the bad coincidences. No one wishes to be hit by a bus or to be diagnosed with a disease, but then the question is, how does this fit into the theory? It doesn't, unless...unless the program doesn't work for each individual but for a planet or universe as a whole.
This all sounds very religious or religion based, but I must say I've never studied any of the religious texts, I only know the basics of the major religions and that's it. But if you imagine the universe as a computer program...it constantly changes and evolves, it upgrades on permanent basis. It gets rid of some projections and creates others...Getting rid of the viruses and objects which could destroy its existence and promoting the existence of those who contribute to the upgrade.
But to the matter at hand, we've gone too far off. The idea I had (which I know is not original at all) is that it may all be govern, like a machine, an artificial machine which looks real to us. We see the pipe, we know it is a pipe, but it may be not. Just a simulation, a projection. A visible element for us to grasp and push us in a certain direction.
Do we decide that direction? I believe we do. Here I believe the philosophy of deism, which states that god created the universe but then left it to evolve on its own. We may be put here by a "program", but I believe that it is us and only us who can determine the path on which we walk. If we set our goals and do all we can to achieve them, the coincidences will follow them. Nothing good comes easy, so the bad coincidences will come, but it is us who decide whether we continue on that path or walk away from it.
We may be a part of a program, but we are programs ourselves. The entire universe or "simulation" is also inside of us, too complicated for us to grasp. Here I'll close with a statement by the comedian Bill Hicks:
“The world is like a ride in an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it's very brightly colored and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question: "Is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say, "Hey, don't worry, don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride.”
