First, a few caveats:
1. This is a summation/distillation of the core concepts I’ve learned about over the last few years as I’ve gone deep down the Enlightenment Zen Non-Duality rabbit hole. I’ve hunted far and wide, across religion, mythology, mysticism, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and quantum physics to try and understand what’s really going on here (waves hands at everything). Continue reading…
Throughout history, via some combination of accident and intent, concepts that should have remained separate have been bundled together into single mental “units,” to which people then added their messy individual interpretations.
This is very, very bad for communication, which I covered in my previous post The Words That Divide Us, but it’s much, much worse for critical thinking.
A few examples should help to illustrate the problem: Continue reading…
As a huge fan of the movie The Matrix, I put together an epic Twitter thread a while back on the deep philosophy of the movie, exploring the many concepts embedded in the movie ranging from the simulation hypothesis and Plato’s Cave, to Zen and non-duality.
But, since most people may never find that old thread, or bother to click through every Tweet, and with the 4th Matrix movie coming out soon, I figured I’d turn it into a blog post that’s easier for folks to consume.
—
In the year of our machine overlords, 1999, quite possibly THE best and most philosophical movie of all time was released 😁. I re-watch this movie every year, and I am STOKED to unleash this epic thread: The Philosophy of the Matrix
As I’ve covered in previous posts, one of the most important lessons one can learn in life is that every person is experiencing a different, personalized version of reality…and while their version of reality may overlap in many ways with that of others, there is never perfect overlap, and in general quite the opposite.
Every mind is filtering and twisting sensory inputs to craft a personalized map of reality, those maps differ wildly from person-to-person, and we never actually experience the true territory of reality…and thus we stand divided.
Herein lies the trouble with genius ideas…they’d probably be great ideas, if the world was inhabited by geniuses.
But true geniuses make up just 0.1% of humanity, while the majority of humans (~84%) are just average or below average intelligence, so we have a bit of a problem. 😎
I was having a chat with a friend the other day about free will, and the simulation hypothesis, and at the end he said something to the effect of, “Well, that makes sense, but even if so I don’t know how that changes anything. I’d live my life the same way.”
Ehhhh…
Knowing always changes things, but it’s difficult if not impossible to know exactly how knowing will change things for *you*. You could become a Morpheus…or you could end up like Cypher 😂
I’ve been thinking for a long time though about the potential natures of reality, and what each might mean, so I wanted to put together a post exploring some of the many possibilities, and how knowing the answer to “What is the nature of reality?” could actually change everything. Continue reading…
