Sunday, January 20, 2008

ATLANTIUM Episode XLVI



















REALITY ON A HARD DRIVE?

Astonishing advances in video game technology has brought us visual extravaganzas like Halo 3. The world of Halo 3 has been fleshed out with arguably the most realistic images a co
mputer can generate. The finished product seems like live action video at times due to the mind bending attention to detail. The video game is barely 30 years old with most of the biggest leaps forward taking place in the last decade. With computer processing and software development advancing exponentially, what will the computer simulations of 10, 20 or even 100 years from now be like? This question has been addressed by Nick Bostrom Director; Future of Humanity at Oxford University. The Humanist and Philosopher poses this big question. Are we all living on a giant Hard Drive?

The star of the video game Halo 3 known simply as the Master Chief is most certainly unaware of his surroundings. But he is the seed of an evolving process that could lead in the future to a completely self aware program that believes that he is real and his computer generated world is real. This is the kernel of the idea being floated by Bostrom, that our world may in fact be an advanced computer simulation. All that we see, hear, feel, and smell are just code on a cosmic supercomputer. This idea is not totally new, Edgar Cayce the 20th century prophet described a vast store of knowledge known to the ancients as the Akasha. The word means "in the aether", or "all around". Cayce saw in a number of his visions a huge database that contained all of the information in the Universe. Every fact about everyplace, everyone and everything that has ever existed, currently exists and will ever exist. The Akasha was know to the ancient Sumer, Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians and Greeks. Cayce and other prophets from the past have detailed how they used the Akasha to see events in both the past and into the distant future. Today one area of study that clearly has captured the attention of many scholars is the strange concept of the Bible Code. Computer programmers have entered the first 5 books of the old testament Hebrew Bible into a database. These are the books brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses and written with the finger of God. All spaces and punctuations have been left out, making one long stream of alpha numeric characters. Researchers then search the database for keywords like September 11th or Kennedy assassination and have been amazed to find that clumps of words are revealed in association with the searches. Much like a Google or Yahoo search the keywords return a list of associated words and phases. The searches can be about people, places or events from the past, present or future. One famous search for former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin reveled that the words "will be assassinated" were found next to his name. He was warned in advance by the Bible Code researches but he was killed in 1995 by a lone gunman. The Akasha records, the Bible Code, are these ancient databases evidence that our reality may exist in part as ones and zeros on a galactic Hard Drive? Nick Bostrom thinks so, and other scientist have looked into the ideas that humans are surrogate remotely operated machines. Like a kids remote controlled car. One theory looks at the possibility that the human body is a complex autonomous sensor package and is remotely operated by some outside influence. One possibility is that intelligent life from a vastly different environment or realm wanting to experience this realm could send in surrogates that have been engineered to thrive in this realm. Some functions of the automaton's would be native, meaning the body would be capable of basic operations and the higher operations would be communicated by a two way data link of some kind. Mankind has been motivated to try and communicate with beings from the astral realms since he learned to walk up-right. Today millions are spent on research of the heavens and deep space in an effort to find our origins. Is reality just a set of advanced computer code? Could our whole World be nothing more than a string of ones and zeros? In the ATLANTIUM continuum the answer is "possibly". The ancients were very familiar with this idea and cryptically wrote about it down through history. If the Bible Code is valid it begs the question...If the future is in a data base who is playing our video game? It is humbling to think that all we know and realize to be reality may be just some fancy computer code written by a geek from some unimaginable realm. ATLANTIUM. Roc Hatfield/Author