Do you ever think it might be real somewhere?

[Daytripper]

Do you ever think it might be real somewhere? I know that mutliverse has been overdone in recent pop culture, but I think that it speaks to something that may hold a certain truth. I'm not just talking about the Mandela Effect, but something more wondrous. We have the fourth wall separating us from reality and fiction. But what if the fourth wall was an actual barrier that divided us from what we in our reality called "fiction"?

We know that universe of Star Wars was the creation of George Lucas. As was Middle Earth for Tolkien. But what if somewhere in another universe or alternate reality it was as real as our lives? And what if there were occasions of beings breaking that fourth wall and visiting "reality" such as Alan Moore's alleged encounter with John Constantine, his own "creation"?

I want you to be open minded and not be so quick to dismiss this idea. After all in these times, what's a little harm in escapism and returning to that childhood sense of wonder?

 

[humon]

Encounters with the supernatural (aliens, demons, angels, ghosts) might be the closest real world phenomenon to what you're talking about. Suddenly a person is confronted by a being that does not belong to the natural world as we understand it, and communicates information the person could not possibly have known himself. It would be as if that other being came from another world where to them, we are the fiction, not written by Tolkien or Lucas or any person, but written by God, or whatever other creator you want to conceive of.

Where the concept of the supernatural has merit is in the fact that the vast majority of information that we could be perceiving is filtered out by our brains as noise. We have to do this, otherwise the world would just be a chaotic mess, like static on a TV screen. We purposefully ignore 99% of what reaches our senses so that from the remaining 1% we can get a clean signal of what we're looking at: objects you can interact with, people who are speaking to you, the ambient weather conditions, where the sky and ground are, all of that. So a supernatural encounter can be framed as, opening up oneself to some of the information we were previously filtering out, and then the brain does the necessary work to make sense of that new information, creating constructs like angels and demons and ghosts and aliens to help us perceive it and interact with it.

The subconscious part of the brain (which is the bulk of its processing), is a giant pattern matching machine with a crude interface to the conscious part of the mind (communicating patterns in the form of dreams and visions and sometimes hallucinations, but also inspiration and gut feelings). Patterns can come from anywhere, and if the subconscious mind picks up on something relevant, it will try to pass that match up to the conscious mind in some form or another, and the conscious mind can choose to be open to these messages or reject them as nonsense (and sometimes it really is nonsense, because the brain matches false patterns all the time, that's how someone can see Jesus in a slice of toast, or a dress is either black-and-blue or white-and-gold depending on who you ask).

Where this can apply to fiction is in the level of inspiration that goes into that fictional world. Was all of it completely made up, or are there underlying patterns in the story that are driven by patterns of reality that the subconscious has been picking up on this whole time and feeding up to the author's pen? I believe this was what happened with the creation of religious myths. Some ancient people, who were sensitive to the sort of patterns most of us filter out of our attention space, picked up on some fundamental things about the world, and then in their minds they manifested those patterns as gods and spirits and a divine cosmology by which to order their lives. So in one sense, the myths are fictional stories, but in another sense they are pointing to something more real than what the senses perceive or can be proven through experimentation. When one of these mystics sees a spiritual being, he literally sees it, and you can't tell him he didn't see it any more than you can tell him the sky isn't blue. So that's the angle I would take for talking about the blurring of reality and fiction.

 

[ALandWithNoName]

i used to love topics like that.

here's a mind game i thought about as a youngling.

online games are basically just interactive code and all, right? when we start thinking about data loss -- or lag -- it's fun to consider how parallel universes work then. say, when a lag spike hits the servers, one person wipes the enemy team; another sees their own pov kill like 3 guys; all one can see is their own character, locked running in a straight line. so and so on.

the fun part is that all these events are happening simultaneously. they are all real to the individual viewer. different realities at the same time. and then comes the hand of quantum-shrodinger's server, wiping it all back to a single state...

anyway.

i remember reading somewhere about the old argument that higher dimensions have to exist solely by the fact that we can conceptualize them. just as a point cannot concept a line, a line cannot concept depth, yet we can concept things like time, and parallels, and beings within. hm.

energy converted into matter, matter converted into energy. always transformed, but never created or destroyed. who's to say that entropy isn't the energy spent thinking of alternate realities, manifesting those realities into existence, elsewhere?

 

[humon]

Collapsing the waveform indeed! The server does not play dice.

I wouldn't say a point can't conceive of a line (or let's say, someone in flatland imagining a cube), because you don't know what people could imagine. The flatland resident wouldn't be able to see a cube, but you don't know what he might be able to conceive of in his imagination. No one's ever met a flatland resident to ask him.

Extra spatial dimensions would be one way to answer the dark matter question, though. Matter in another dimension would behave like dark matter, exerting gravity without interacting in any other way with the matter we know. And if the math says the milky way is up to 95% dark matter, that seems consistent with looking at a cross-section of an iceberg and wondering where all the rest of the ice is.

 

[Blue burrowing critter]

Definitely, hypothetical infinity is well, infinite, so yes.
In all those infinite possibilities it's literally guaranteed that it's real, but that's just a theory, a Game Theory!
Man I miss Matpat, anyway definitely, and I'm pretty sure it's basically the plot of half of the God's stories, with them watching us mortals do our thing.